My mother was disappointed when I opted for Latin rather than Domestic Science, particularly because she wouldn’t receive a decorated Christmas cake. (I am sure other recipes were taught.)
As I attended an English all girls’ grammar school, there was no opportunity to learn woodwork or metalwork, but cricket was available though not soccer or rugger. Sciences were encouraged : several girls went on to become doctors and vets, as well as teachers and many other professions.
Single-sex education has its drawbacks, but the encouragement for girls to take up a wide range of opportunities is an advantage, certainly in my day and in the all-girls school in which I taught for the latter part of my career.
At university however, my cohort studying French was told that however much we didn’t like the idea, the majority of us would become teachers. Probably true at that time.
I changed schools in about 3rd year in Secondary, so dropped Domestic Science at that point. But the 'boys only' subject at the new school was, oddly, Art. However, I came with marks of +90% in the subject - plus I managed to wangle out of PE on medical ground (I suffer from a loathing of running around in muddy fields in the middle of winter), so I was let do it.
Before I dropped Domestic Science, I was awarded top marks in the theory,* but failed the practical - this was the year of needlework. I would doubtless have performed similarly in metalwork, had that been available.
* The exam included drawing and labelling a sewing machine, and describing, with diagrams, how to insert a zip, in case anyone is wondering.
In 8th grade in California in the 70s, boys had a year of shop class, woodworking and metal work, and girls had home economics, which was half cooking and half sewing. For me this was a total waste of time, as my mother had already been teaching me to cook and to sew, and I spent the whole year silently judging the teacher for teaching cooking and sewing methods that didn't work as well as Mom's.
I regretted going to grammar school in the UK in the 1960’s as the choices were so narrow. There was no possibility that this girl who was totally unsuited to the ‘domestic sciences’ of cooking and sewing could do what the boys did instead, so I had to endure the bullying of the two dreadful teachers for five long years. They did however allow two boys to join in with cooking during the last year, as they wanted to be chefs.
My husband had a more enlightened upbringing as his father used to cook, having learned how to do so during the war. So he does most of the cooking (and mending) - we are compatible! - and our sons were brought up to do so. They are all better cooks than me.
My father was a life-long Scouter, and for him that meant that boys in general, and his sons in particular, should know how to cook (meaning more than add water and heat), how to do their own sewing, iron, laundry, etc.
I distinctly remember the time I asked my mother to iron a shirt for me. My older brother was there and said “Why are you asking her to do that when you can do it yourself?” “I don’t know how,” I answered. My brother said, “Well, go get the iron and the ironing board; I’ll show you how.”
I got none of that at school, but I definitely got it at home from my father and brother.
I am the youngest of 8 children and by the time I was a teenager my 3 older sisters had left home. So if my parents went away I was expected to cook for my 4 older brothers, two of whom were at least 8 years older than me. I remember having to sew replacement buttons on my brother’s suit jacket before my grandfather’s funeral when I was 16. Which was bizarre because I was taught by my father how to sew buttons on.
Mr Heavenly and I share the cooking and taught both our sons to cook before they went to university.
(I can sew to a high standard, having had a part-time sewing business when my children were younger, and, similar to Ruth, would pass judgement on the poor sewing methods my sons were being taught at school).
My elder brother and I (mid/early teens) taught ourselves to cook, having appetites for something beyond my mother's workaday repertoire - curry, mainly.
I imagine sometimes teaching cookery by showing how to recreate popular processed foods from fresh ingredients- eg pizza from crusty bread, tomato purée and cheese. In fact I think that was was how I (and the brother) learned to cook - by attempting to recreate exotic (to us) foods. And of course this was in the 1960s/70s when there was not the plethora of ready meals.
But how many children of all sexes are like my younger brother - a lifelong devotee of chips, onion rings and everything fried (and yes, its now killing him)?
Education tends to be for the way society is, rather than how it ought to be. So I'm not seeing a win for home cooking vs UPF manufacturers.
Couple of things. Here at our local middle school, both boys and girls took half a semester of shop and half a semester of home ec. My girl learned how to do simple carpentry and the boys learned how to do basic cooking and sewing. I know their final project was to show a pair of gym shorts in home ec. From cutting out the pattern to the final project. When they got to high school there was a course offered in food preparation and several shop classes offered to everyone. Food preparation was for those who wanted to go into the restaurant business. Completing that class gave the kids food handlers permits on completing the class. Two of my sons took that class because they worked in food preparation in high school on into adulthood. They also took welding. I cannot remember what our daughter took in industrial arts, though.
In other news, the University of Idaho just closed their women's center on orders from the Idaho State Board of Education. Its BOE is being run by a bunch of conservatives who want to close anything that smacks of a Diversity Equality Inclusion program. The Women's Center started 52 years ago when the Title IX program started. Title IX is a federal law that said any educational program receiving federal funding was required to offer an equal number of women's sports as men's sports. Because of Title IX, women's sports really took off. We now have professional women's basketball and women's professional soccer and other very strong women athletes in our Olympic programs.
The Women's Center, though, was not a part of the Title IX program, but an outgrowth of it. The University of Idaho's Administration and faculty and staff senates were very opposed to the BOE move, but the BOE funds the university. They really had no choice. They think losing the DEI programs will impact future enrollment especially from out of state students.
The school where I taught latterly was single sex, but part of a foundation with a parallel boys’ school. Some sixth form lessons were taught jointly, and the nursery was co-ed. Single sex was from 5- 16/ 18, depending on choice of A levels.
However from next September, huge changes will see just one school, although pupils aged 11-16 will be taught separately.
There are vocal protests from alumni, who valued the girl-only ethos. I wonder if the male alumni feel the same, for different reasons?
At that point my only cooking experience had been in billy-cans over an open fire at Guide camp. I arrived at University unable to make e.g. spag bol, but I could whip up a mean Hazelnut Dacquoise.
Mrs C has an exercise book full of practical recipes that she acquired from a school class, which includes spag bol, coq au vin, and beef stew, and a basic bechamel sauce that could become any number of things with modest additions, as well as various recipes for cakes, flapjacks, and the like.
I never came anywhere near cooking at school: the closest we got was burning a peanut in a calorimeter to determine its energy content. I was fortunate in that my mother cooked (and cooks) rather well, so I spent my childhood absorbing an understanding of cooking without really knowing, whilst being put in to service as kitchen assistant, which meant that when I had to cook for myself, it wasn't difficult.
My father had one meal, that he would cook every time mum was out for the evening - a chicken curry that he had learned from his own father, who had picked it up during his wartime service. It had boiled eggs in.
From what I recall the research suggests girls (on average) thrive in single sex schools, while boys do worse. This does rather suggest an ongoing problem with "lad" culture and the pipeline into toxic masculinity.
I attended a comprehensive and, barring a handful of segregated PE lessons in Y10 and Y11 (I think this was likely to try and make girls less self-conscious and more willing to take part), the same options were available to everyone. We all did what were termed Design Technology "construction", "food", "textiles" and, latterly, "graphics" and were required to take one to GCSE. I took Food, which got me the side benefit of a Food Hygiene Certificate. I think there were 3 boys in our class of 20. School, and secondary school in particular, were deeply unpleasant places, and I think it's probably not an exaggeration to say that the nearly 25 years since I left have been an ongoing exercise in undoing the toxic behaviour school taught me - aggression, unkindness, meanness, cruelty, misogyny, homophobia. How much of that was the culture of my school, the time period, the area, and how much is to do with ongoing manifestations on cultural ideas of what it means to be male I'm not sure.
I suspect I am sufficiently very slightly older than many of those who have posted on this thread for this to make a difference to my take on this.
In the far of days when I went to school almost all secondary education in England was segregated, in the UK meaning of that word rather than the US one. This was not totally universal, but this was also just before the switch to comprehensive schools. It applied not just to grammar schools but also to secondary moderns. This meant that at secondary level, boys were almost entirely taught by men and girls by women. That almost certainly affected their curricula.
I do not think it is reasonable to criticise CS Lewis (1898-1963) for taking a lot of things for granted that people may not think now and certainly do not approve of but which people of his generation and even later generations accepted largely without thinking about it.
Even when I went to university and then trained professionally, it was still the case that very few girls did law, probably only about 5-7% of the average intake. I can remember highly intelligent girls then, the sort that were going on to university to read English or Modern Languages stating it as axiomatic that most girls would not even want to do law or to earn their living that way. This changed markedly quite soon after that, probably sometime in the 1970s.
There was a later stage when it was quite difficult to get across to younger professional women that they could not really complain yet that very few women were becoming judges. People do not, and should not, become judges until they have enough years of experience under their belts. There just had not then been sufficient female intake into the legal profession 30 years previously to provide that many female judges, and there was nothing now that anybody could do about that except wait.
Couple of things. Here at our local middle school, both boys and girls took half a semester of shop and half a semester of home ec. My girl learned how to do simple carpentry and the boys learned how to do basic cooking and sewing
I've had a couple of kids go through our middle school's version of this recently. The cooking component was completely worthless: there was no actual cooking involved, and the highlight of the class was "making pizza", where the kids put sauce from a jar on a pre-prepared pizza base, and then added their choice of toppings. Then the pizzas went away and were returned cooked, and were eaten. The sewing component was similarly worthless.
According to my kids' reports, the classes were populated roughly evenly by girls and boys, but there was a markedly gendered response to the class. The class was presented as an "elective" at the middle school level, but the details of the school timetable meant that everyone had to elect it, unless they were in both choir and band. So effectively it's a compulsory class. There were exceptions, but in general, most of the boys weren't interested in doing it, or in learning any skills, and so slowed the class down to tortuously slow rates. The girls split roughly evenly in to a group that wanted to sew or cook (but mostly already had some sewing or cooking skills, so didn't actually learn anything), and a group that didn't care.
My high school algebra teacher announced on the first day of class that you needed to be outstanding at math or a good-looking girl to sit in the front two rows of my class. I was seated near the back.
Title IX is a federal law that said any educational program receiving federal funding was required to offer an equal number of women's sports as men's sports. Because of Title IX, women's sports really took off.
Title IX quickly did a lot for US women's college athletics in the 70s and 80s, but progress since then has been an extremely slow slog, and women's participation in college athletics still lags behind their college enrollment rates. There is still massive inequality; far more money is spent on men's college athletics than women's (source: fivethirtyeight.com). This violates Title IX, but they just lie about it (source: USA Today data analysis).
The real success of Title IX is in its effect on women's education, not sports. According to NOW, women's undergraduate enrollment surpassed men's in 2000, and "in 2018–19, women earned 61% of all associate degrees, 57% of all bachelor’s degrees, 61% of all master’s degrees, and 54% of all doctoral degrees conferred."
The problem in 1972 was that colleges and universities flat-out discriminated against women in their enrollment policies. Now we have different problems. The gender gap in educational attainment is worse than it was in 1972, but in the opposite direction. Men still hold many or even most of the traditional positions of power -- women run only 10% of Fortune 500 companies, to give just one example -- but most men aren't in those powerful positions, and now compared to women they are significantly less likely to go to college. The follow-on effects from this are powerful.
How do people feel about single sex education these days?
I'm not sure I'm keen - in the uk it tends to be grammar schools (selective) and high pressure. I've heard (over the years) plenty of anecdotes about an increased prevelance of eating disorders on the girls side and toxic masculinity on the boys.
Title IX is a federal law that said any educational program receiving federal funding was required to offer an equal number of women's sports as men's sports.
Title IX applies to more than sports. It prohibits any discrimination on the basis of sex at any school, college, university or other educational program that receives federal funding.
@Ruth accurately describes ways in which Title IX has played out.
How do people feel about single sex education these days?
I'm not sure I'm keen - in the uk it tends to be grammar schools (selective) and high pressure. I've heard (over the years) plenty of anecdotes about an increased prevelance of eating disorders on the girls side and toxic masculinity on the boys.
I think there are advantages and disadvantages. My school was all boys for most of my schooling. There were clear advantages - for those of us who were straight, which was assumed to be all of us, not having girls present meant no getting distracted by relationship drama, no need for adolescent boys to posture for the girls (and vice versa, I suppose).
Fewer distractions and complications, get on with learning.
As far as the "toxic masculinity" you mention, there was some of it, but it was I think an opinion weakly held. It's easy to have all sorts of stupid opinions about girls and women through ignorance, but those opinions don't stand up when you meet actual women; the majority of my compatriots who exhibited some of these behaviors wised up pretty quickly.
The school I attended until age 12 went mixed the year before I left (the two things were not connected!). There was a noticeable shift in attitudes in that last year - with the "high status" boys (and girls) feeling the need to couple up and be part of publicly-acknowledged couples. Not that anything happened in these couples beyond the occasional bit of hand-holding and a statement that you were boyfriend and girlfriend, but it was deemed socially important to have that coupled status.
My son, by contrast, has pretty much always got on better with girls than boys. He'd have been thoroughly miserable in an all-male environment.
My four grandchildren, cousins, a girl and boy on each side, went to single-sex state grammar schools. They live out of the county, and had to qualify by passing an entrance exam. After that, for the girls, places were offered according to proximity, whatever their mark, whilst boys were accepted in rank order of performance in the entrance exam. ( Grandson W scored one short of full marks. ) The alternative was local co-educational comprehensive schools.
I would say that the choice was a resounding success for one family, less so for the other and I think that has more to do with parental support than any other reason.
When I passed the 11+ in 1956 I opted for a girls’ grammar, as did all but one of the girls from my class. The other went to a mixed school, but left without qualifications as she became pregnant. The boys all chose the mixed school, except for one whose parents opted for a fee paying boys school for him. One boy and one girl turned down the grammar school place and went to the mixed secondary modern.
I cannot say what became of any of my former classmates bar one, who became a shorthand-typist. Eating disorders were not heard of back then. If they existed they were not mentioned, though a couple of pupils I taught were affected, but that was 30+ years later.
They live out of the county, and had to qualify by passing an entrance exam. After that, for the girls, places were offered according to proximity, whatever their mark, whilst boys were accepted in rank order of performance in the entrance exam.
Interesting - do you know what motivates this difference in admissions policies?
Thank you for correcting what I said about Title IX @Ruth and @Nick Tamen. I was already beyond undergraduate level in 72, going to an almost all male seminary by that time. There were a few women who were in sem, going for their Masters in Religion at the time so I was not fully versed on it.
I went to all male undergraduate college and seminary. Speaking for myself, I think it stunted my relationships with members of the opposite sex. While nearly all my high school mates were married by 25, it took me till 28 to find a partner for life.
Where I grew up every public education program was co-ed, from kindergarden through Y12. There was the division between courses offered to girls and courses available for boys in the upper four years. But by the time I got to Y11 I would say half the kids taking typing were male and a good number of males were also taking stenography because we collectively decided if we were going to go to college, it would be good to take better note takers and paper writing. Home Ec, though, remained a female domain.
About the major change I experienced in high school, though, was the inclusion of females in sports. This was before Title IX; nevertheless, the females and their parents were demanding inclusion, We moved from a female form of basketball to full on basketball that is now being played everywhere. We had as many girls in track and field as we had boys. Football was still all male, but the girls were offered volleyball. We were a small school that could only offer three seasonal sports activities through the year at the time. Glad to say there are a much larger number of sports offering now.
To the point @Ruth makes about male sports still getting a lion's share of collegiate funding. Sad but true. Male football is big business. Wish I knew how to equalize it more. But I would say the women's basketball program is making much better strides in that area compared to male basketball programs.
To @Leorning Cniht said about what their kids experienced in middle school, it sounds as if our school district expected more than just making pizza. Frankly, middle school is a very hard place to teach kids anything. I remember one educational prof I had saying middle school is just where you place kids for three years while their hormones rage out of control.
They live out of the county, and had to qualify by passing an entrance exam. After that, for the girls, places were offered according to proximity, whatever their mark, whilst boys were accepted in rank order of performance in the entrance exam.
Interesting - do you know what motivates this difference in admissions policies?
I went to an all boys independent day school in the 1990s. Highly competitive, extremely well known, list of Old Boys that have gone on to change the world etc.
I wouldn’t have said we had much toxic masculinity to be honest. The odd dynamic there though was that we had no divide between the ones that were good at sport and those who were more academic.
It was assumed (probably correctly) that if you were even there then you were more academic.
So it did produce in each year group these sort of super humans* who there was absolutely no hiding from or measuring up to or against… eg the School Captain would easily also be the rugby captain, have 11 A* at GCSE, get four As at A Level, Grade 8 Trumpet, an Army Scholarship and then get a first and an All Souls Fellowship.
*I exclude myself, though I was a useful occasional outside centre in the Third/Fourth XV.
It was observed (I think accurately) in the school history published in the early 1990s that my school as a result tends to produce people who keep their cards very close to their chest because they are so used to having any opinion or plan shot down in flames by the person sitting next to them, who effortlessly comes up with something better.
This has me wondering if you attended the boys' school next door to my girls' school. (I think we come from the same region.)
In my case, as a socially awkward, bright girl, I was definitely better off there than at my very rough local comprehensive. Where I don't think it was a particularly healthy environment is the drive towards perfectionism and being good at everything. For example, I remember sitting at the back of the cello section in the orchestra* muddling my way through a Mahler symphony thinking "I'm crap at music". It was only years later that I realised most teenagers can't play Mahler at all, badly or otherwise.
* activities like music were joint with the boys next door FWIW.
This has me wondering if you attended the boys' school next door to my girls' school. (I think we come from the same region.)
In my case, as a socially awkward, bright girl, I was definitely better off there than at my very rough local comprehensive. Where I don't think it was a particularly healthy environment is the drive towards perfectionism and being good at everything. For example, I remember sitting at the back of the cello section in the orchestra* muddling my way through a Mahler symphony thinking "I'm crap at music". It was only years later that I realised most teenagers can't play Mahler at all, badly or otherwise.
* activities like music were joint with the boys next door FWIW.
I went to an all boys independent day school in the 1990s. Highly competitive, extremely well known, list of Old Boys that have gone on to change the world etc.
I wouldn’t have said we had much toxic masculinity to be honest. The odd dynamic there though was that we had no divide between the ones that were good at sport and those who were more academic.
It was assumed (probably correctly) that if you were even there then you were more academic.
So it did produce in each year group these sort of super humans* who there was absolutely no hiding from or measuring up to or against… eg the School Captain would easily also be the rugby captain, have 11 A* at GCSE, get four As at A Level, Grade 8 Trumpet, an Army Scholarship and then get a first and an All Souls Fellowship.
*I exclude myself, though I was a useful occasional outside centre in the Third/Fourth XV.
Similarly, our divide was between those good at sports and those - not.
I was so firmly in the latter camp that the other people in it seemed like sporting superhumans to me. I've never been able to hit tennis balls with tennis racquets, catch a rugby ball or intercept a football. My cricket innings last as long as it takes the bowler to realise he just needs to bowl straight at the stumps and he'll have me in a couple of balls. On the rare occasions I make a runable hit I usually get run out standing transfixed in sheer amazement to shouts of "for fecks' sake RUN!" Meanwhile as a bowler I consider it a roaring success when I don't bowl a no ball or a wide. Batters could score a half century against one of my overs.
I was so far down the pecking order I had to go to school with a lamp in my hat and a fecking canary.
I think one if the risks of single sex education is that it can you make you blind to the perspective of the other gender.
I am going to assume @betjemaniac's schoolmates were led to believe that they would work, marry and then have their children largely raised by their spouse likewise most of the domestic work done for them by her. If they didn't have a spouse then by someone, almost certainly a woman, they would pay to do it.
I think one if the risks of single sex education is that it can you make you blind to the perspective of the other gender.
Yes I did wonder. I think the tenor of 'toxic masculinity' has changed, and so we wouldn't necessarily expect what we experienced to what is around now, and besides, as you say, maybe you need to ask the partners (where appropriate).
I'm not @betjemaniac but we have now established that we went to equivalent boys' and girls' schools.
I didn't get that vibe from my side of the road. It was expected of us girls that we would be high fliers and captainesses of industry in our own right. Academics were a big deal and it was regarded as a bit of an embarrassment at the girls' school when we were lower down the league table than the boys. (Didn't happen often - most years the girls came out top.)
There were small amounts of mixing between the two schools. Betjemaniac may or may not remember that the windows of the girls' establishment overlooked the boys' school drive. Girls who arrived before the bell rang could sit in the windowsills and watch the boys arriving. One day our form teacher walked in (male, FWIW), saw the girls sitting on their perches and casually remarked, "Oh. Window shopping."
Nonetheless I think this particular high-flying private boys' schools may be a bit of an anomaly, precisely by virtue of having equally high-flying girls within window shopping distance.
I think one if the risks of single sex education is that it can you make you blind to the perspective of the other gender.
I am going to assume @betjemaniac's schoolmates were led to believe that they would work, marry and then have their children largely raised by their spouse likewise most of the domestic work done for them by her. If they didn't have a spouse then by someone, almost certainly a woman, they would pay to do it.
I'm not @betjemaniac but we have now established that we went to equivalent boys' and girls' schools.
I didn't get that vibe from my side of the road. It was expected of us girls that we would be high fliers and captainesses of industry in our own right. Academics were a big deal and it was regarded as a bit of an embarrassment at the girls' school when we were lower down the league table than the boys. (Didn't happen often - most years the girls came out top.)
There were small amounts of mixing between the two schools. Betjemaniac may or may not remember that the windows of the girls' establishment overlooked the boys' school drive. Girls who arrived before the bell rang could sit in the windowsills and watch the boys arriving. One day our form teacher walked in (male, FWIW), saw the girls sitting on their perches and casually remarked, "Oh. Window shopping."
Nonetheless I think this particular high-flying private boys' schools may be a bit of an anomaly, precisely by virtue of having equally high-flying girls within window shopping distance.
Pretty much, although tbh for all the difference it made that drive might as well have been a mile wide.
Though shalt be a doctor, dentist, banker, military officer, academic. Thou shalt expect to marry similar.
An afterthought: after all that educating me to be someone very educated and influential, I actually did become more or less a stay-at-home parent, working part time on the side as a freelancer. I'm not sure they'd regard that as success. (To which: sod'em. I'm living my best life.)
Whereas I was never encouraged to attain anything, at school or at home, and left school after my O levels (I never did A levels as my parents wanted me to get a job and contribute to the household rent). Yet I became an academic. It’s a funny old world.
Be happy being you. Success means different things to different people. My mum thought me becoming a nurse the most wonderful thing in the world, she was so proud, but she had no interest in any of my academic achievements - she didn’t understand them because they were not part of her world.
My parents were proud when I passed exams and got good school reports, but had no idea on how you leveraged academic success into a career. Theirs was the traditional idea that you knew someone who 'got you in'.
To be fair, the official advisors weren't much better: you're a female arts graduate and you don't want to teach? Um.
It was a matter of astonishment to me to realise that not everyone could reach the same basic level of attainment. My mum left school at 14 but could read fluently, spell correctly and do mental arithmetic, so I assumed this was normal- until I realised some children in my 11+ class could not. Whether they went on to improve I know not.
Yes, my all girls’ school may have deprived us, despite its advantages. There was no equivalent boys’ school. We even had our own private bus, so no mixing with boys on public transport. Our spinster Head Mistress always referred to boys as “ undesirables”. Didn’t she realise that increased our desire?
I think one if the risks of single sex education is that it can you make you blind to the perspective of the other gender.
I am going to assume @betjemaniac's schoolmates were led to believe that they would work, marry and then have their children largely raised by their spouse likewise most of the domestic work done for them by her. If they didn't have a spouse then by someone, almost certainly a woman, they would pay to do it.
Am I mistaken in that assumption ?
Very mistaken indeed
You were taught to expect to take an equal role in childcare and household management ? I do find that surprising. You were at school a good 10 years after me though - perhaps things moved on faster than I would have expected.
I think one if the risks of single sex education is that it can you make you blind to the perspective of the other gender.
I am going to assume @betjemaniac's schoolmates were led to believe that they would work, marry and then have their children largely raised by their spouse likewise most of the domestic work done for them by her. If they didn't have a spouse then by someone, almost certainly a woman, they would pay to do it.
Am I mistaken in that assumption ?
Very mistaken indeed
You were taught to expect to take an equal role in childcare and household management ? I do find that surprising. You were at school a good 10 years after me though - perhaps things moved on faster than I would have expected.
We weren’t taught anything about it at school at all.
However, as suggested, we were in a hot house environment, where any girl we (rarely)came into contact with was at least our intellectual match if not our better, so the thought of adult life being anything other than a partnership of equals genuinely never occurred to me.
I am going to assume @betjemaniac's schoolmates were led to believe that they would work, marry and then have their children largely raised by their spouse likewise most of the domestic work done for them by her. If they didn't have a spouse then by someone, almost certainly a woman, they would pay to do it.
Am I mistaken in that assumption ?
I'm not @betjemaniac either, but his answer roughly mirrors my experience. We obviously had biology classes that discussed human reproduction, and we had a set of classes whose name I forget, but I suppose you could call PHSE, or "growing up to be a decent human", which talked about consent and respect in personal relationships, amongst other things, largely from a theoretical point of view. But the general tenor was very much that relationships were for very much later, after we had graduated from university and got settled, so there was no discussion at all about how our domestic lives might be organized at that point.
You might view that as "the subject didn't come up because that was the woman's job", but I don't think that was the implication at all. I think the viewpoint was much more "this isn't something you're going to be doing soon, so we're not going to be talking about it."
In terms of role models, most of the staff were male, but there were a small number of younger female teachers, and apart from a great deal of adolescent mooning over the attractive ones, there was no suggestion that they were anything other than the intellectual equals of their male counterparts.
We weren’t taught anything about it at school at all.
However, as suggested, we were in a hot house environment, where any girl we (rarely)came into contact with was at least our intellectual match if not our better, so the thought of adult life being anything other than a partnership of equals genuinely never occurred to me.
If I'm reading you correctly, your experience of your education was not "directly" gendered in terms of partnership expectations. It was indirectly gendered, so to speak. Both you and your prospective partner would have been expected to rely on the paid labour of a woman, or women, to take care of household tasks and childcare.
We weren’t taught anything about it at school at all.
However, as suggested, we were in a hot house environment, where any girl we (rarely)came into contact with was at least our intellectual match if not our better, so the thought of adult life being anything other than a partnership of equals genuinely never occurred to me.
If I'm reading you correctly, your experience of your education was not "directly" gendered in terms of partnership expectations. It was indirectly gendered, so to speak. Both you and your prospective partner would have been expected to rely on the paid labour of a woman, or women, to take care of household tasks and childcare.
Um no. Really no.
Both I and my prospective partner would have been expected to muddle along together.
This goes back to my whole doubts with Epiphanies, the second intervention of a poster’s opinion/belief (ideological assumption?) to critique a poster’s own experience of a specific (in this case an individual school) - made slightly more endurable here because I know there’s at least one other person on the thread that knows exactly where I’m talking about and that I’m not making this up.
True, one can only speak to one's own time and place. In mine, it was expected that the woman would undertake all domestic labour - would even, if she married, give up her career for that and childcare.
By way of preparation, besides Domestic Science, I recall that on Fridays a couple of girls from the 6th forms were drafted to wash up the coffee/tea cups in the staff room. This was the late 60s. I wonder at what point in time this weird little bit of social conditioning was dropped?
Comments
As I attended an English all girls’ grammar school, there was no opportunity to learn woodwork or metalwork, but cricket was available though not soccer or rugger. Sciences were encouraged : several girls went on to become doctors and vets, as well as teachers and many other professions.
Single-sex education has its drawbacks, but the encouragement for girls to take up a wide range of opportunities is an advantage, certainly in my day and in the all-girls school in which I taught for the latter part of my career.
At university however, my cohort studying French was told that however much we didn’t like the idea, the majority of us would become teachers. Probably true at that time.
* The exam included drawing and labelling a sewing machine, and describing, with diagrams, how to insert a zip, in case anyone is wondering.
I distinctly remember the time I asked my mother to iron a shirt for me. My older brother was there and said “Why are you asking her to do that when you can do it yourself?” “I don’t know how,” I answered. My brother said, “Well, go get the iron and the ironing board; I’ll show you how.”
I got none of that at school, but I definitely got it at home from my father and brother.
Mr Heavenly and I share the cooking and taught both our sons to cook before they went to university.
(I can sew to a high standard, having had a part-time sewing business when my children were younger, and, similar to Ruth, would pass judgement on the poor sewing methods my sons were being taught at school).
I imagine sometimes teaching cookery by showing how to recreate popular processed foods from fresh ingredients- eg pizza from crusty bread, tomato purée and cheese. In fact I think that was was how I (and the brother) learned to cook - by attempting to recreate exotic (to us) foods. And of course this was in the 1960s/70s when there was not the plethora of ready meals.
But how many children of all sexes are like my younger brother - a lifelong devotee of chips, onion rings and everything fried (and yes, its now killing him)?
Education tends to be for the way society is, rather than how it ought to be. So I'm not seeing a win for home cooking vs UPF manufacturers.
In other news, the University of Idaho just closed their women's center on orders from the Idaho State Board of Education. Its BOE is being run by a bunch of conservatives who want to close anything that smacks of a Diversity Equality Inclusion program. The Women's Center started 52 years ago when the Title IX program started. Title IX is a federal law that said any educational program receiving federal funding was required to offer an equal number of women's sports as men's sports. Because of Title IX, women's sports really took off. We now have professional women's basketball and women's professional soccer and other very strong women athletes in our Olympic programs.
The Women's Center, though, was not a part of the Title IX program, but an outgrowth of it. The University of Idaho's Administration and faculty and staff senates were very opposed to the BOE move, but the BOE funds the university. They really had no choice. They think losing the DEI programs will impact future enrollment especially from out of state students.
That is too bad.
However from next September, huge changes will see just one school, although pupils aged 11-16 will be taught separately.
There are vocal protests from alumni, who valued the girl-only ethos. I wonder if the male alumni feel the same, for different reasons?
Mrs C has an exercise book full of practical recipes that she acquired from a school class, which includes spag bol, coq au vin, and beef stew, and a basic bechamel sauce that could become any number of things with modest additions, as well as various recipes for cakes, flapjacks, and the like.
I never came anywhere near cooking at school: the closest we got was burning a peanut in a calorimeter to determine its energy content. I was fortunate in that my mother cooked (and cooks) rather well, so I spent my childhood absorbing an understanding of cooking without really knowing, whilst being put in to service as kitchen assistant, which meant that when I had to cook for myself, it wasn't difficult.
My father had one meal, that he would cook every time mum was out for the evening - a chicken curry that he had learned from his own father, who had picked it up during his wartime service. It had boiled eggs in.
I attended a comprehensive and, barring a handful of segregated PE lessons in Y10 and Y11 (I think this was likely to try and make girls less self-conscious and more willing to take part), the same options were available to everyone. We all did what were termed Design Technology "construction", "food", "textiles" and, latterly, "graphics" and were required to take one to GCSE. I took Food, which got me the side benefit of a Food Hygiene Certificate. I think there were 3 boys in our class of 20. School, and secondary school in particular, were deeply unpleasant places, and I think it's probably not an exaggeration to say that the nearly 25 years since I left have been an ongoing exercise in undoing the toxic behaviour school taught me - aggression, unkindness, meanness, cruelty, misogyny, homophobia. How much of that was the culture of my school, the time period, the area, and how much is to do with ongoing manifestations on cultural ideas of what it means to be male I'm not sure.
In the far of days when I went to school almost all secondary education in England was segregated, in the UK meaning of that word rather than the US one. This was not totally universal, but this was also just before the switch to comprehensive schools. It applied not just to grammar schools but also to secondary moderns. This meant that at secondary level, boys were almost entirely taught by men and girls by women. That almost certainly affected their curricula.
I do not think it is reasonable to criticise CS Lewis (1898-1963) for taking a lot of things for granted that people may not think now and certainly do not approve of but which people of his generation and even later generations accepted largely without thinking about it.
Even when I went to university and then trained professionally, it was still the case that very few girls did law, probably only about 5-7% of the average intake. I can remember highly intelligent girls then, the sort that were going on to university to read English or Modern Languages stating it as axiomatic that most girls would not even want to do law or to earn their living that way. This changed markedly quite soon after that, probably sometime in the 1970s.
There was a later stage when it was quite difficult to get across to younger professional women that they could not really complain yet that very few women were becoming judges. People do not, and should not, become judges until they have enough years of experience under their belts. There just had not then been sufficient female intake into the legal profession 30 years previously to provide that many female judges, and there was nothing now that anybody could do about that except wait.
I've had a couple of kids go through our middle school's version of this recently. The cooking component was completely worthless: there was no actual cooking involved, and the highlight of the class was "making pizza", where the kids put sauce from a jar on a pre-prepared pizza base, and then added their choice of toppings. Then the pizzas went away and were returned cooked, and were eaten. The sewing component was similarly worthless.
According to my kids' reports, the classes were populated roughly evenly by girls and boys, but there was a markedly gendered response to the class. The class was presented as an "elective" at the middle school level, but the details of the school timetable meant that everyone had to elect it, unless they were in both choir and band. So effectively it's a compulsory class. There were exceptions, but in general, most of the boys weren't interested in doing it, or in learning any skills, and so slowed the class down to tortuously slow rates. The girls split roughly evenly in to a group that wanted to sew or cook (but mostly already had some sewing or cooking skills, so didn't actually learn anything), and a group that didn't care.
Title IX quickly did a lot for US women's college athletics in the 70s and 80s, but progress since then has been an extremely slow slog, and women's participation in college athletics still lags behind their college enrollment rates. There is still massive inequality; far more money is spent on men's college athletics than women's (source: fivethirtyeight.com). This violates Title IX, but they just lie about it (source: USA Today data analysis).
The real success of Title IX is in its effect on women's education, not sports. According to NOW, women's undergraduate enrollment surpassed men's in 2000, and "in 2018–19, women earned 61% of all associate degrees, 57% of all bachelor’s degrees, 61% of all master’s degrees, and 54% of all doctoral degrees conferred."
The problem in 1972 was that colleges and universities flat-out discriminated against women in their enrollment policies. Now we have different problems. The gender gap in educational attainment is worse than it was in 1972, but in the opposite direction. Men still hold many or even most of the traditional positions of power -- women run only 10% of Fortune 500 companies, to give just one example -- but most men aren't in those powerful positions, and now compared to women they are significantly less likely to go to college. The follow-on effects from this are powerful.
I'm not sure I'm keen - in the uk it tends to be grammar schools (selective) and high pressure. I've heard (over the years) plenty of anecdotes about an increased prevelance of eating disorders on the girls side and toxic masculinity on the boys.
@Ruth accurately describes ways in which Title IX has played out.
I think there are advantages and disadvantages. My school was all boys for most of my schooling. There were clear advantages - for those of us who were straight, which was assumed to be all of us, not having girls present meant no getting distracted by relationship drama, no need for adolescent boys to posture for the girls (and vice versa, I suppose).
Fewer distractions and complications, get on with learning.
As far as the "toxic masculinity" you mention, there was some of it, but it was I think an opinion weakly held. It's easy to have all sorts of stupid opinions about girls and women through ignorance, but those opinions don't stand up when you meet actual women; the majority of my compatriots who exhibited some of these behaviors wised up pretty quickly.
The school I attended until age 12 went mixed the year before I left (the two things were not connected!). There was a noticeable shift in attitudes in that last year - with the "high status" boys (and girls) feeling the need to couple up and be part of publicly-acknowledged couples. Not that anything happened in these couples beyond the occasional bit of hand-holding and a statement that you were boyfriend and girlfriend, but it was deemed socially important to have that coupled status.
My son, by contrast, has pretty much always got on better with girls than boys. He'd have been thoroughly miserable in an all-male environment.
I would say that the choice was a resounding success for one family, less so for the other and I think that has more to do with parental support than any other reason.
When I passed the 11+ in 1956 I opted for a girls’ grammar, as did all but one of the girls from my class. The other went to a mixed school, but left without qualifications as she became pregnant. The boys all chose the mixed school, except for one whose parents opted for a fee paying boys school for him. One boy and one girl turned down the grammar school place and went to the mixed secondary modern.
I cannot say what became of any of my former classmates bar one, who became a shorthand-typist. Eating disorders were not heard of back then. If they existed they were not mentioned, though a couple of pupils I taught were affected, but that was 30+ years later.
Interesting - do you know what motivates this difference in admissions policies?
I went to all male undergraduate college and seminary. Speaking for myself, I think it stunted my relationships with members of the opposite sex. While nearly all my high school mates were married by 25, it took me till 28 to find a partner for life.
Where I grew up every public education program was co-ed, from kindergarden through Y12. There was the division between courses offered to girls and courses available for boys in the upper four years. But by the time I got to Y11 I would say half the kids taking typing were male and a good number of males were also taking stenography because we collectively decided if we were going to go to college, it would be good to take better note takers and paper writing. Home Ec, though, remained a female domain.
About the major change I experienced in high school, though, was the inclusion of females in sports. This was before Title IX; nevertheless, the females and their parents were demanding inclusion, We moved from a female form of basketball to full on basketball that is now being played everywhere. We had as many girls in track and field as we had boys. Football was still all male, but the girls were offered volleyball. We were a small school that could only offer three seasonal sports activities through the year at the time. Glad to say there are a much larger number of sports offering now.
To the point @Ruth makes about male sports still getting a lion's share of collegiate funding. Sad but true. Male football is big business. Wish I knew how to equalize it more. But I would say the women's basketball program is making much better strides in that area compared to male basketball programs.
To @Leorning Cniht said about what their kids experienced in middle school, it sounds as if our school district expected more than just making pizza. Frankly, middle school is a very hard place to teach kids anything. I remember one educational prof I had saying middle school is just where you place kids for three years while their hormones rage out of control.
Sorry, I don’t.
I wouldn’t have said we had much toxic masculinity to be honest. The odd dynamic there though was that we had no divide between the ones that were good at sport and those who were more academic.
It was assumed (probably correctly) that if you were even there then you were more academic.
So it did produce in each year group these sort of super humans* who there was absolutely no hiding from or measuring up to or against… eg the School Captain would easily also be the rugby captain, have 11 A* at GCSE, get four As at A Level, Grade 8 Trumpet, an Army Scholarship and then get a first and an All Souls Fellowship.
*I exclude myself, though I was a useful occasional outside centre in the Third/Fourth XV.
In my case, as a socially awkward, bright girl, I was definitely better off there than at my very rough local comprehensive. Where I don't think it was a particularly healthy environment is the drive towards perfectionism and being good at everything. For example, I remember sitting at the back of the cello section in the orchestra* muddling my way through a Mahler symphony thinking "I'm crap at music". It was only years later that I realised most teenagers can't play Mahler at all, badly or otherwise.
* activities like music were joint with the boys next door FWIW.
Was your uniform an interesting shade of green?
There we go then
Similarly, our divide was between those good at sports and those - not.
I was so firmly in the latter camp that the other people in it seemed like sporting superhumans to me. I've never been able to hit tennis balls with tennis racquets, catch a rugby ball or intercept a football. My cricket innings last as long as it takes the bowler to realise he just needs to bowl straight at the stumps and he'll have me in a couple of balls. On the rare occasions I make a runable hit I usually get run out standing transfixed in sheer amazement to shouts of "for fecks' sake RUN!" Meanwhile as a bowler I consider it a roaring success when I don't bowl a no ball or a wide. Batters could score a half century against one of my overs.
I was so far down the pecking order I had to go to school with a lamp in my hat and a fecking canary.
I am going to assume @betjemaniac's schoolmates were led to believe that they would work, marry and then have their children largely raised by their spouse likewise most of the domestic work done for them by her. If they didn't have a spouse then by someone, almost certainly a woman, they would pay to do it.
Am I mistaken in that assumption ?
Yes I did wonder. I think the tenor of 'toxic masculinity' has changed, and so we wouldn't necessarily expect what we experienced to what is around now, and besides, as you say, maybe you need to ask the partners (where appropriate).
I didn't get that vibe from my side of the road. It was expected of us girls that we would be high fliers and captainesses of industry in our own right. Academics were a big deal and it was regarded as a bit of an embarrassment at the girls' school when we were lower down the league table than the boys. (Didn't happen often - most years the girls came out top.)
There were small amounts of mixing between the two schools. Betjemaniac may or may not remember that the windows of the girls' establishment overlooked the boys' school drive. Girls who arrived before the bell rang could sit in the windowsills and watch the boys arriving. One day our form teacher walked in (male, FWIW), saw the girls sitting on their perches and casually remarked, "Oh. Window shopping."
Nonetheless I think this particular high-flying private boys' schools may be a bit of an anomaly, precisely by virtue of having equally high-flying girls within window shopping distance.
Very mistaken indeed
Pretty much, although tbh for all the difference it made that drive might as well have been a mile wide.
Though shalt be a doctor, dentist, banker, military officer, academic. Thou shalt expect to marry similar.
Be happy being you. Success means different things to different people. My mum thought me becoming a nurse the most wonderful thing in the world, she was so proud, but she had no interest in any of my academic achievements - she didn’t understand them because they were not part of her world.
To be fair, the official advisors weren't much better: you're a female arts graduate and you don't want to teach? Um.
Yes, my all girls’ school may have deprived us, despite its advantages. There was no equivalent boys’ school. We even had our own private bus, so no mixing with boys on public transport. Our spinster Head Mistress always referred to boys as “ undesirables”. Didn’t she realise that increased our desire?
You were taught to expect to take an equal role in childcare and household management ? I do find that surprising. You were at school a good 10 years after me though - perhaps things moved on faster than I would have expected.
We weren’t taught anything about it at school at all.
However, as suggested, we were in a hot house environment, where any girl we (rarely)came into contact with was at least our intellectual match if not our better, so the thought of adult life being anything other than a partnership of equals genuinely never occurred to me.
I'm not @betjemaniac either, but his answer roughly mirrors my experience. We obviously had biology classes that discussed human reproduction, and we had a set of classes whose name I forget, but I suppose you could call PHSE, or "growing up to be a decent human", which talked about consent and respect in personal relationships, amongst other things, largely from a theoretical point of view. But the general tenor was very much that relationships were for very much later, after we had graduated from university and got settled, so there was no discussion at all about how our domestic lives might be organized at that point.
You might view that as "the subject didn't come up because that was the woman's job", but I don't think that was the implication at all. I think the viewpoint was much more "this isn't something you're going to be doing soon, so we're not going to be talking about it."
In terms of role models, most of the staff were male, but there were a small number of younger female teachers, and apart from a great deal of adolescent mooning over the attractive ones, there was no suggestion that they were anything other than the intellectual equals of their male counterparts.
If I'm reading you correctly, your experience of your education was not "directly" gendered in terms of partnership expectations. It was indirectly gendered, so to speak. Both you and your prospective partner would have been expected to rely on the paid labour of a woman, or women, to take care of household tasks and childcare.
Um no. Really no.
Both I and my prospective partner would have been expected to muddle along together.
This goes back to my whole doubts with Epiphanies, the second intervention of a poster’s opinion/belief (ideological assumption?) to critique a poster’s own experience of a specific (in this case an individual school) - made slightly more endurable here because I know there’s at least one other person on the thread that knows exactly where I’m talking about and that I’m not making this up.
Experiences vary. These are mine.
By way of preparation, besides Domestic Science, I recall that on Fridays a couple of girls from the 6th forms were drafted to wash up the coffee/tea cups in the staff room. This was the late 60s. I wonder at what point in time this weird little bit of social conditioning was dropped?