The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[DanaC]

working-class women had pretty much always worked though. The stereotype was a stereotype - true for some, not true for some. Femininity, which included things like housekeeping (fucking hard work for most at the time) was like a swan on the water - it looked graceful and easy, because you couldn't see the legs working. That notice was written by someone who couldn't see the legs - it assumes a level of fragility that wouldn't have applied for a lot of women.

Deferrence to men and assumptions that men would generally know more and take a leadership role was pretty ingrained for most people though. As was a degree of dependence for women - the idea of the man as essentially the adult with an understanding of the world and a paternal authority and women as more childlike an so on. I think much of that would have been absorbed and accepted as natural. My comment about making the workplace welcoming in similar tones to making a place suited for children was not really about them patronising women, so much as it was an observation of how the tone of the advice demonstrates the way men and women were separated hierachically and culturally in similar ways to the separation between adults and children. The idea of women as sitting somewhere between children and adult males is a pretty old one.