Hopefully, by now, you know the story of the repressed history of female pilots in WW2. A couple more quotes for you from the Mary Sue:
“The families of the 38 women who died were not allowed to display gold stars in their windows, because their daughters were not recognized as veterans.”
“The WASPs received a letter informing them that their service was over. Two days after that letter came, “several of us received letters from aircraft companies inviting us to come and be stewardesses,” remembers Rohrer. “I was so angry, I tore that letter up.”
Right now, Wingtip-to-Wingtip, a non-profit is $29,000 short of the funds needed to get a float honoring the WASPs in the Rose Bolw parade. The web site states the deadline is November 8. Please do something to protect women’s history and women’s stories, so we can pass it on to our daughters and sons. Don’t let these women disappear from our cultural mythology. Donate now.
All of this really makes me think how different our world would look if women were the ones with the money.
These women flew over 60 million miles within a 2 year period…However, after a nasty and aggressive campaign by male pilots who wanted the WASPs’ jobs, they were the only wartime unit that was denied military status by congress…For many years the WASPs kept their achievements quiet. Their service in World War II would only be known by a few. They are not mentioned in our history books, nor is their story taught in schools.Their accomplishments of being the first women to fly in the military would even be forgotten.
I haven’t seen the documentary yet, so I don’t know the details of the “nasty and aggressive campaign by male pilots” which successfully erased the stories of these female heroes from our history books. But I am somewhat of an expert on current kid culture, and I can tell you that stories about female heroes continue to go missing right now.
Thousands of years ago, conquering armies smashed the idols of their victims and stole their stories, an extremely effective tactic to destroy a community and steal its power. Christians did this to pagans, but of course, this act is all over history. Just like the goddess morphed into the Virgin, girls are going missing under the guise of celebration. Right now, in 2013, Disney is stealing and sanitizing stories. It’s an annihilation. How long before we all forget the original story? Will our children ever hear it?
I am reeling from this WW2 story, not because of the sexism of the past, but because of the sexism today. Want to see some sexist male pilots? Check out this preview from Disney’s recent hit, “Planes.”
Plane One: What’s taking this guy so long? Is he really as good as he says he is?
Plane Two: No, better.
Plane One: Whoa! Who was that?
Plane Three: (Descending fast on top of the other two) Well, hello ladies! Ready to lose?
Plane Three goes on to leave the “ladies” in the dust.
When I saw that preview with my three young daughters, I thought the plane who mocks the slow flyers by calling them “ladies,” was having a moment of arrogance. The movie would redeem him when he went through his transition. But when I actually saw the movie, I learned that I couldn’t have been more wrong. The sexist joke is his fantasy, the fantasy of a humble crop duster with a fear of heights who wishes he were a racer. It’s the dream sequence of a “likeable” character. Can you imagine a hero making a racist joke and being likeable? In a movie for little kids? Yet, that’s how much sexism we have to wade through before a female flyer is allowed to win a race in animation.
Yesterday, I posted about a three year old girl in my daughter’s preschool who told a teacher she can’t be a pilot, but she can be a pilot’s wife. You can tell your kids, until you’re blue in the face, that they can be anything they want to be, but if you don’t show them, through images and stories, they won’t believe you. They won’t believe in themselves. Little girls are obsessed with princesses and ballerinas, and later, supermodels, because those are the few times females are allowed to be the star in the show. Everyone wants to be the star in their own movie, their own life, but girls, again and again, are literally, pushed to the sidelines.
If you look at the erasure of these female pilots from World War II, the government obviously participated in the sexism. Allowed it to happen and sanctioned it. This is not an isolated event of the past. How can we, literally, sit back and watch it happen again and again?
On my recent post about WW2 pilots, I got this comment from Abnoba
“The actual race in Planes is totally dominated by male competitors.” How shocking! You mean in real life the actual race is not dominated by male competitors?… This stuff is silly nonsense.
This feminist whine that animated movies for kids should reflect “progressive feminist” values is the kind of thing that gives feminism a bad name. Why? Because it’s silly overreach as usual.
The idea that animators see machines that race (airplanes, cars, dunebuggies, drag racers, etc.) as a male world isn’t an irrational sexist bias – it’s simply reality. Males – and especially boys – are by nature gung ho about machines to a degree that girls are not is obvious to anyone not wearing feminist blinders. That it’s necessary to point this out these days is a comment on the nuttiness of the feminist whiners who are constantly arguing that these natural differences are not natural but socially imposed. It’s B.S. Boys and girls are different from head to toe and always have been and always will be.
Please show this picture to your kids. It’s likely they won’t see it anywhere else.
These women flew over 60 million miles within a 2 year period…However, after a nasty and aggressive campaign by male pilots who wanted the WASPs jobs, they were the only wartime unit that was denied military status by congress…For many years the WASPs kept their achievements quiet. Their service in World War II would only be known by a few. They are not mentioned in our history books, nor is their story taught in schools.Their accomplishments of being the first women to fly in the military would even be forgotten.
One pilot says, “Such a shame that when we disbanded, they took all of our records and they sealed them, and they were stamped either classified or secret and filed away in the government archives.”
Sealed records. WTF? Male accomplishments are celebrated and honored and women’s are hidden. ARGH. Sexist decisions of the past are affecting our kids TODAY. More stories about women’s real lives, repressed. Thank God for Jill Bond who made this film. Do you see how reality creates fiction creates reality? Do you see why we need women writers, artists, filmmakers, and on and on? Do you see who goes missing and how distorted reality and our perception of reality becomes when, for thousands of years, women have been existing in stories written by men?
Please, show this picture to your kids.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I hope it’s good for children. Wouldn’t it be great to make a children’s version? A book to go along with it? A computer game? An app? A LEGO set? What do you think the chances are we’ll see any of that? They are low, because still, in 2013, we live in a world where women’s stories go missing.
Yesterday, a teacher at my daughter’s preschool told me that she saw two boys and a girl spinning the knobs of a play oven. Boy #1 says: “I’m a pilot! I’m flying a plane.’ Boy #2 says: “Me too!” The girl is quiet, so the teacher says to her: “What about you, are you a pilot?” The 3 year old girl replies: “I can’t be a pilot. I’m a pilot’s wife.”
So what do you think has happened in this little girl’s short life to make her believe it’s more likely that she would be a pilot’s wife than a pilot?
Could it be that in her world, those are the gender roles she sees? While books, movies, and TV shows for children are full of images of boys riding magical creatures into the sky– from “ET” to “How to Train Your Dragon” to Harry Potter — girls are stuck in the passenger seat if they get to soar at all. Here are three images repeated endlessly in the media.
I’m always on the look out for images in children’s media of girls flying, and they are few and far between. If I seek them out, I can find them, but these pictures rarely cross my children’s path, not in movies, or posters for those movies, or on most of the book covers they come across when we’re shopping at a local store. Here’s a picture from The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches that I photographed a while ago, because it’s so rare.
Today, on Facebook feed I saw that Toward the Stars is celebrating Female Flying Daredevils week, posting “We wave enthusiastically to all our girls and boys that aspire to travel above the clouds.”
We also have Angela’s Airplane which my 4 year old daughter loves.
You may not have seen these books around. They may not have been made into major motion pictures for kids or toys or LEGO sets, but, please click on the links. Stock your libraries. Read these books to your kids, and that includes your sons. All children need to see far more female daredevils.
Keep watching Toward the Stars all week for more recommendations of fearless females flying the skies.
Update: So right after I post this, I see on Facebook info about the documentary:”We Served Too: The Story of Women Air Force Pilots of World War II.” You’ve got to watch this trailer.
These women flew over 60 million miles within a 2 year period…However, after a nasty and aggressive campaign by male pilots who wanted the WASPs jobs, they were the only wartime unit that was denied military status by congress…For many years the WASPs kept their achievements quiet. Their service in World War II would only be known by a few. They are not mentioned in our history books, nor is their story taught in schools.Their accomplishments of being the first women to fly in the military would even be forgotten.
One pilot says, “Such a shame that when we disbanded, they took all of our records and they sealed them, and they were stamped either classified or secret and filed away in the government archives.”
Sealed records! I am so mad about this. Again, women’s stories are repressed and hidden, affecting a new generation of kids. I haven’t seen the film yet, so don’t know if it’s good for young kids. Wouldn’t it be great to make a children’s version? A book to go along with it? A computer game? App? A LEGO set? What do you think the chances are we’ll see any of that? They’re low, because in 2013, we still live in a world where women’s stories go missing.
This video by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media is amazing!
Our goal at the institute is to dramatically increase the percentage of female characters and reduce gender stereotyping in film ans television that is made for kids, little kids, 11 and under, and what we found is very disturbing. For every one female character, there are 3 male characters. Not only that, male characters get to do stuff. They get to have fun and have adventures. Females, not so much. We also wanted to know what the percentage of male and female characters was in crowd scenes in movies. We found only 17% of characters in crowd scenes are females. Women make up 50% of population in the world…
Meet Jane. She’s an animated character. She’s adorable, quirky, and has spunk. Her special skill is that she can do absolutely anything that an animator can think of for her to do. Except stand around in a bikini. Not because she can’t, but because she doesn’t want to. So why does Jane look sad? It’s because she has never been cast in an animated film or television show. Why is that? It seems like it would be so easy to cast Jane in some interesting and challenging role for her. I want to see Jane. I mean, we see Dick. We see Dick all the time.
Please donate to the Geena Davis Institute at www.seejane.org
Last night, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted anti-choice Texas attorney general Greg Abbott’s request to allow the state’s new, onerous anti-abortion law to go into effect. This means that clinic closures across the state could be imminent.
“This is a dire day for Texas women,” said Heather Busby, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. “Greg Abbott’s insistence that the circuit court reverse the lower court’s injunction clearly demonstrates that he is a foe to women. He does not believe that Texans deserve the right to make their own personal, private medical decisions.”
The Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas’ new admitting privileges requirement will go into effect immediately. Local abortion providers estimate that the law will close 13-15 health centers. Many women will not be able to get the care they need, whether it be abortion care or a whole array of preventive services such as family planning that reproductive- health centers provide.
As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English explain in the 2010 revision to their classic book “Witches, Midwives & Nurses,” between the 14th and the 17th centuries, tens of thousands of people were killed as witches. Estimates range, but the latest scholarship puts the number at roughly 100,000 people, 80-85 percent of them women. By the mid-16th century there were villages where all but one woman had been killed for practicing witchcraft.
What were these women burned (also strangled, hanged and beheaded) to death for? Well, first, charges often amounted to condemnations of being female and sexual, two qualities that even today, religious fundamentalists of all stripes tend to deplore. Elaborate fantasies about women engaging in intercourse with the devil were a regular feature of witch trials. Second, women were persecuted for associating with other women, accused of forming covens or holding parties with Satan. Women who came together to celebrate holidays or to share information, trade herbs, gossip or otherwise, you know, hang out together were considered dangerous. Third, women were punished for being poor and helping the poor. As Ehrenreich and English point out, the church was inclined to instruct the desperately impoverished, who made up the vast bulk of the population, to bypass the ministrations of women healers and look to the afterlife for solace while, at the same time, supporting medicine and medical help for the nobility…
Read the whole post, it shows how the fear of women and persecution of witches always rose during challenges to authority, such as when the scientific revolution and enlightenment weakened the church, witchburning was pushback.
I get that for men as a group, it must have been pretty scary, since the beginning of time, before sex was even connected to reproduction, to know women are the ones who have the power to give birth. Continuing the species is a pretty important role. I also understand that women have tremendous sexual power over men, and that can be scary, too. It makes sense to me that for men, as a group, recognizing this female power, along with allowing women financial, social and political power can be be terrifying. But, this is the year 2013. It’s time to get over fear of female power. This paranoia is hurting the world, our kids, and the potential of the human race. Everyone has to face their fears and move past them. Texas, it’s your turn. Stop the witch hunt.
My 4 year old daughter got this Hallmark card yesterday for Halloween in the mail:
The good news is, right away, she said, “Oh no, only two girls. Eight boys.” She gets it. But the bad news, of course, is the repetitive message in kidworld, whether from Hallmark or Target, boys can be so many things– pirates, superheroes, cowboys, monsters, skateboarders, clowns, or aliens. Girls, however, get limited choices.
My daughter will be Wonder Woman tonight, and I’m off to go see if, at this last minute, I can find her a golden lasso….
Slate recently posted “More Than A Woman: The unwritten and silly rule that allows one woman to run for office at a time,” about how Juliette Kayyem, candidate for Governor of Massacusettes, was supposedly expected to drop out of the race when another female, Martha Coakley, announced her candidacy. This post goes on to describe how the idea of “one woman at a time” is an expectation that happens all the time in politics.
Often in politics there is an automatic, unspoken, assumption that only one woman can run at a time. For example, stories about Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren that speculate about whether she will or won’t run for president, generally take it as a given that Warren can’t possibly enter the Democratic primary if Hillary Clinton decides to run. But why is this the automatic assumption? Warren is an utterly different kind of politician with a distinct biography and a passionate following. She and Clinton have even had substantive disagreements in the past about bank regulation, one of Warren’s central issues. Nobody ever told Howard Dean to get out of the race because John Kerry was running. What law dictates that there can be only one woman per major race at a time?
This limited perception dominating our cultural imaginary reminded me of the comment from the head animator of “Frozen” that “having a film with two hero female characters was really tough.” Here they are, and I’ve got to say, I can barely tell the difference between them. Now do you think the similarity is because females look so much alike in the real world, or do you think the issue is the artist’s limited perception of how female heroes can look?
I’ve been blogging for a long time about the Minority Feisty, a term describing the current state of the fantasy world and the real one: strong females are allowed to exist, but only in a limited way. Today, if you see a movie for children, most feature a male protagonist, while females, who are, in fact, half of the kid population, are presented as if they were a minority. Within that minority, there will be a strong female or two who reviewers will invariably call “feisty.” I call these characters the “Minority Feisty.” “Frozen” is one of 4 movies for children in 2013 with a female protagonist, while 21 feature a male protagonist. And still, in our feminist movie, we have the animator say how hard it was for him to make two females and they look like this? I know they’re sisters, but come on.
So here’s a few more questions I have: Why are we conditioning a new generation of kids to accept the rule of the Minority Feisty? Why is the fantasy world, where anything is possible, so sexist?
And how many of our kids have seen images like this one?
Check that out: four powerful women pictured together and their facial features are different. From In This Together Media:
was unveiled today at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.. Painted by Nelson Shanks, the portrait depicts the four female Supreme Court Justices, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The painting was commissioned to show young women what is possible.
If our children grew up surrounded by images like this, how do you think it would affect who they are and become, how they perceive themselves and each other?
In music, we love the idea of the screwed-up, shooting-up. fucked-up artist. The one bleeding in the garret having cut his own ear off. Jay-Z is a new kind of 21st-century artist where the canvas is not just the 12 notes, the wicked beats, and a rhyming dictionary in his head. It’s commerce, it’s politics, the fabric of the real as well as the imagined life.
Stephen Mitchell in Can Love Last, the Fate of Romance Over Time
It is the hallmark of the shift in basic psychoanalytic sensibility that the prototype of mental health for many contemporary psychoanalyitc authors is not the scientist but the artist. A continual objective take on reality is regarded as neither possible nor valuable in contrast to the ability to develop and move in and out of different perspectives of reality.
New York Times, October:
Public narratives about a career make a difference. The most common career aspiration named on Girls Who Code applications is forensic science. Like Allen, few if any of the girls have ever met anyone in that field, but they’ve all watched “CSI,” “Bones” or some other show in which a cool chick with great hair in a lab coat gets to use her scientific know-how to solve a crime. This so-called “CSI” effect has been credited for helping turn forensic science from a primarily male occupation into a primarily female one.
Jezebel reacting to New York Times piece:
The New York Times today would like to suggest that storytelling is powerful, that, in the whole art/life dynamic, it’s life that imitates art, not the other way around, at least not when it comes to kids imagining viable career paths for themselves.
Whoopi Goldberg:
Well, when I was nine years old Star Trek came on. I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, ‘Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.
In the fantasy world, anything is possible, so why do little kids see so few female heroes and female protagonists on TV and in the movies? While boy “buddy stories” are everywhere you look, why is it so hard to see two females working together to save the world? Why are females, half of the kid population, presented as a minority in fantasy world? Why are TV shows, movies, and books about boys “for everyone” while shows and movies about girls “just for girls?” When we pass on stories to our kids, what are we teaching them about gender, about who they are right now and who they will become?
One more quote for you from neuroscientist, Lise Eliot:
“Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds, grammar, and intonation of any language, but then the brain wires it up only to perceive and produce a specific language. After puberty, its possible to learn another language but far more difficult. I think of gender differences similarly. The ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. This contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired.”
Eliot believes: “Simply put, your brain is what you do with it.”So let’s all use our brains to imagine gender equality in the fantasy world, take actions to manifest that vision, and see what happens next. I bet it’ll be amazing.
Want to see a celebrity wearing an inappropriate costume? Fergie’s ‘Pageant Girl’ from Halloween 2012 makes me ill.
If you care at all about the sexualization of little girls, why would a grown woman dress up as a little girl dressed up as a woman? (Assuming that is, little girls with heavy make-up and curled hair aspire to imitate older beauty queens and not Martians.) Talk about blurring boundaries between sexualizing little girls and adults. This costume makes my head spin, besides making me want to vomit. But here’s what Heidi Klum thinks of it, as quoted in Us Magazine:
Accessories can put a costume over the top! Fergie couldn’t have looked any better as a pageant girl.
While we in America celebrate rock stars for sexualizing kids, France outlawed child beauty pageants earlier this year. The New York Times reported:
Pageants are popular in smaller towns across France, though far less frequent and less intense than in the United States. And France has no equivalent of American reality shows like “Toddlers & Tiaras” and its spinoff, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” that feature very young contestants.
Still, the intense focus on beauty here, combined with a surge of images of sexualized, prepubescent girls, has raised fears that the pageants could take on the over-the-top quality of American contests…
Ms. Jouanno, a former junior minister for environment and a senator representing Paris from the center-right party U.D.I., wrote a report on the “hypersexualization” of children in 2011.
Apparently, the USA has a long, long way to go to protect, honor, and value American girls. Bad move, Fergie.
