Blog #2 interview with younger generation

Lisa is a young lady I work with in our Pediatric clinic.  She is half my age, filling a contract nurse position for six months. She is the first person in her immediate family to earn a college degree and considers this her greatest accomplishment. Her example has resulted in three female cousins attending college and also becoming nurses in the last six years. Nursing is primarily filled with women but this is changing. Today thirteen percent of nursing students in the United States are men.  Gender patterns are evolving and gender is defined as a process creating the social differences that define “men” and “women” are changing.    Lorber talked about “doing gender” without thinking about it.  Men travel with babies in strollers in the New York subways dressed neutrally making it hard to identify whether the child is male or female until you see flowered sneakers.  People smile at these men and probably secretly admire their part in their child’s upbringing.

 

Lisa states she does not feel limited as a young woman and thinks we limit ourselves. I thought this was very intuitive coming from someone so young. I think she is a confident, competent nurse and an asset to our clinic. There is such a thing in nursing called “eating your young” and I find myself protecting Lisa from my two older co-workers when they become overly critical.  I was pleased that Lisa handles herself very well with them but does voice frustration to me at times. Peggy McIntosh describes white privilege as being “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.”  I think Lisa has white privilege and acted on this to use educational opportunities even though she doesn’t really recognize it as such.   She does not consider herself a feminist, although she is benefitting from many aspects of feminism including education.

 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) began nineteenth-century feminism.  Wollstonecraft’s debated ideas Jean-Jaque Rousseau had where he stated, “Educate women like men and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us.”  Wollstonecraft’s objected saying that she didn’t wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.   I think Lisa does have power because she has paved a way to be self-sufficient and led others to do the same.   She regrets having financial debt from attending college and wishes she would have attended a Community College for two years which would have cost less and then transferred to a four year college to decrease her debt.  She is responsibly repaying her debt and I reminded her that if we ate an elephant, it would be one bite at a time.  Young people are so used to obtaining things quickly; they forget that the best things come with time.  Patience is a virtue. For instance, college degrees. She is happy with her choice to become a nurse because she likes to take care of people and enjoying her work is very important.  Nursing is a nurturing role which is considered a feminine characteristic.  Perhaps that is why it has taken so long for men to cross these gender lines.  

Lisa also wishes she could have left home earlier and hopes to travel to Greece and Europe in the future. She is benefiting from the Feminist movement.  In Betty Friedman’s,The Feminine Mistique, she explores the unsettled life women lead when they are not able to be complete.  Their dreams seemed limited to motherhood and childrearing. Lisa has more dreams and wishes which are attainable in her lifetime.  Friedman reported a woman had a nervous breakdown when she could not breast feed her baby.  It seems that balance in women’s lives was missing.  There was fear of losing femininity when women were independent and educated and achieving equality with men in America during this time.  I don’t think equality has come full circle yet in America and because of men and women’s differences I don’t think it will ever be equal across the board.  Gender schemas are a continuum today.

 Unlike Betty Friedman, Lisa still wants something more than nursing, she wants a husband, children and a home.  Since taking this course it tickled me how today young women have the opportunity to go to college and work before they get married and start a family.  Feminism is responsible for calling attention to many subjects pertaining to women and calling for change. Some traditional roles for women are not coveted by men just shared more than in past history.  It is great to see and live during this time. I enjoy working with Lisa and hope to keep in touch with her when her contract is over.  Today that is much easier with modern day conveniences like the intranet and texting.

 

References

Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.

Lorber, Judith. "The Social Construction of Gender" Trans. Array Women's Voices, Feminist Voices: Classic and Contemporary Readings. . 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2012. 126-128.

Mainardi, Pat. "The Politics of Housework." Trans. Array Women's Voices Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. . 5th ed. New York : Mc-Graw-Hill, 2012. 414-417.

 McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege and Male Privilege. Women's Voices Feminist Visions(5th). (S. M. Shaw, & Lee, Janet, Eds.) New York, NY, USA: McGraw Hill.

Shaw, S. M., & Lee, J. (2012). Learning Gender. In S. M. Shaw, & J. Lee, Women's Voices, Feminist Visions (p. 109). New York: McGraw Hill.

Wollstonecraft, M. Excerpt from A Vindication of the Rights of Women Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: Joseph Johnson, 17920. Reprinted in Carol H. Poston, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, The Wollstonecraft Debate, Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), pp.21-22, 25-28, 43, 57-58, 62, 147-48, 191-94.