In my own life, I have always considered myself a feminist. I went into engineering, went to a school that was only 25% female, and have always tried to educate and respect myself. I may have not always succeed in respecting myself but as I made mistakes I have learned from them and think I am at least on the road towards giving my body and mind a better self image. While I may have fallen prey to sexualizing myself for attention and am recovering, that is not the case for most of my generation. I think young women have been lulled into the false sense that feminism is both unneeded, old and faded as well as "butch," unattractive, and non-feminine; which is stunting the feminist movement. This has created a generation that has the privilege to vote, get into universities, start careers in technical fields, opportunities that their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers never had but are throwing away because of the massive idea that women should be trying to be pretty, sexual, and stupid.
To start out my search for feminism in my generation I'll start with myself, seems fair.
As a young girl I was lucky to excelled at math at an early age and be in a public school system with advanced programs. In 5th grade I was tested for an accelerated program and was accepted. This was the perfect time because it was before I was exposed to the full frontal assault that is middle school. Middle school brings on all the issues of relationships, popularity, fitting in, and especially puberty with an increased importance on being female. The accelerated classes started in 6th grade where instead of being placed in a class with 7th graders we were placed in separate class. There were 6 6th graders total, 5 boys and me. I knew one of my friends had been accepted into the program but decided it would be too hard and didn't join (she just graduated from John Hopkins in with an engineering/nano technology degree). Looking back there maybe have been outside pressures or ideas that told me as a girl I shouldn't be pointing myself out as being good at math but I was too young/stubborn to notice.
After feeling special and unique for being a female in accelerated math/science programs and a degree in Chemical Engineering from a top ranked technical institute, has a piece of me perpetuated that women don't belong in these fields and that you have to be "special" to survive?
When first meeting new people there is a set of questions you go through:
1. Name
2. Job
3. Martial Status
4. Mommy? (Yes even at 23 I regularly get this question from other women, but this is another blog post altogether)
5. Living location
6. Interests
After question 2 I get "O that's so great that you are a woman in the science/technology field." I smile, I'm proud, I try to be polite. Usually I add that everyone has their talents, if "I'm terrible at math and science" is included with the first statement. On the inside I am conflicted, I like the attention, I like feeling special but why am I? I was naive and stubborn when I set out on my track to be an engineer and just was a little too lazy to find anything else that might interest me. I don't feel like the vision of a feminist warrior in my head. But at the same time I really want to point out, "why do I seem so special?"
Because really the reason that women make up such a small percentage of engineers is because in the beginning girls aren't told that they can be engineers, that they can be good at math and science. Instead women adults say, "I'm terrible at math and you must have to be really really smart to be an engineer." I would love to tell these women, "Is that what you tell your daughters, nieces, mentees, young girls in general? That you have to be really really smart to like math and science?" I want to both be known that women can be engineers but at the same time I don't want girls to think it's way too hard like my friend did back in 5th grade.
This is what originally got me started on this train of thought:
Feminist Frequency is a great video blog for critiquing popular culture.
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