Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 15, 2014

Let kids be kids.

Let her teach, They do need to know that doesn’t have to be the be all and end all of a woman’s life.

Right you are. All options should be open. Just needs to ask who wants to be the doctor mommy, the detective mommy, or the president mommy.

Mommies can fly planes. Daddies can cook dinner., Sometimes daddy stays home to take care of kids, sometimes the mommy does,.

The big difference between being a mother and another job is you don’t get paid to be a mother … instead it costs.

We’re getting there, slowly. 10 years ago when my daughter was 5 the teacher asked everyone what they wanted to be – she said a builder (by which she really meant engineer) – the teacher said ‘girls can’t be builders’. It still rankles, but was perhaps a good lesson for her in antediluvian attitudes.

‘Let kids be kids.’ – indeed. Unfortunately, a trip around most toy stores will show that we’re still guiding them into genderised roles – pinkified ‘girls’ aisles with dolls and toy household appliances, ‘boys’ aisles with the decent construction kits and science toys. It’s getting better but there’s still a way to go.

Hopefully by now any girl can say ‘builder’ or ‘mother’ – and any boy can say ‘nurse’ or ‘daddy’ if they wish.

She didn’t encourage them much by separating them by gender first. If she asked them all at once, the results might have been different. Also if she asked what they wanted to DO instead of BE.

Mommy doesn’t have to be an exclusive choice.

Having had a single working mom, my ambition always was to stay home with my kids. Which I did. (Nowadays, few families can afford to have a potential wage-earner stay home.) Back in the early seventies in Manhattan, when asked the inevitable, “what do you do?” if I said, “I’m home with my kids,” I immediately became an object of complete disinterest. Finally I began to say, “I’m in an in-house program of juvenile development.” few people ever asked for details, but at least they would keep talking to me!

Have to indoctrinate them into the cult early or they may develop open minds.

Trouble is, there’s a time limit on being a mother. Best to give that priority while you’re young. Both in having them and raising them so we don’t get a bunch of feral yutes.

Of course, it’s tough for a father to support a stay-at-home mother these days. Taxes, reflation of the housing bubble, destruction of the currency, burning corn for fuel and inflating food prices, fascist roadblocks to small business development (which big business buys, often from Democrats), etc.

Marzipan: and you and me are free to be, you and me…

Free to be you and me with Marlo Thomas had its 40th anniversary in 2012!

When I was in school, the nuns told me women had 4 choices: nun, teacher, nurse or secretary. All except nun were to be given up at marriage. They also said the Almighty invented housekeeping to keep women happy (NOT!!!)

It doesn’t matter what one wants to be as long as you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else in the process.

The real difference between an outside job and a mother is that 80% of people dislike their job (proven fact) and can’t wait to get home, and a mother works with people she loves, often a difficult job but with its rewards.

About five years ago one of my granddaugher’s teachers told her that she’d better ask her dad to help with a math problem. Well, the kid’s mom, S., had a father who’d written math and AutoCAD textbooks, and S. had taken a calculus class for funsies when in college, outdoing most of the engineers in her class (she was a music major). Probably just as well I wasn’t available then to air my views to that teacher.

I like how the kids today don’t see gender rolls anymore, it’s just do what you want, not what is necessarily traditional. In my day, we weren’t encouraged to help change diapers or bathe the kids, we were to go to work, come home to a clean house and dinner, have a quiet evening with the paper or a tv show before bed and then do it again. It didn’t occur to me that my wife might want to do something else, this was what women were supposed to do. I like it much better when we are in equal roles and love that our kids think we were weird. Our daughter isn’t interested in having kids, says she’s just not into that, wants to travel and see the world. Good for her, I say. Whatever she wants to do, isn’t that what we went through all this for, was for them to not have to be pigeon holed?

Wake up! We don;t need no more babies! Besides, babies have no future———the climate change will kill millions of them before they can have babies of their own

Wow – despite the number of years that have passed, I am amazed at the number of people who still see what Joanie is doing (providing alternatives to girls) as indoctrination. Apparently, many still believe a girl’s one aspiration should be to be a mother and any attempt to get her to see that she has options is brain washing.

:: head/desk ::

Usually, I agree with Trudeau. Today, I beg to differ..I don’t think the problem is that girls want to be mommies. What I find disturbing is that the boys don’t want to be daddies!

My second wife says that her father was always telling her she did stuff really well, “for a girl”. She brought home A’s in science and math, as well as every other subject, and it was always, “really good, for a girl”. She said she felt discouraged, that her father didn’t think she was good enough to compete in a man’s world, that her A’s were not equal A’s. This was during the 70’s on into the 80’s.

When I was a kid and read job ads in the daily paper (Pittsburgh Press), jobs were divided into ‘Help Wanted Men’ and ‘Help Wanted Women’. -All of the jobs under ‘Men’ were the higher paying jobs. Some were construction (listed under ‘Trades’ and usually involving an apprenticeship that could start while you were in high school), some were listed under ‘Business’, some were listed under ‘Math, Medicine and Science’. A lot required a college degree. Almost all the ‘Medicine’ jobs were doctor jobs. No nurses, physical therapists, X-ray techs or the like.-Most of the jobs listed under ‘Women’ were either ‘Office’ (and were classified as secretarial or bookkeeping), ‘Medical assistance’ (some were nurses and nurses aides, a few were physical therapists, but most were caretaker type jobs), teaching (including tutoring, but no positions at area colleges), and ‘temp workers’. Temp workers included nurses, and always had the longest list and lowest pay.-I can also remember that when we hit 7th grade (no middle school then, it was called ‘junior high school’) the girls were required to take home economics and the boys took a class called ‘shop’. The shop class was actually a math class and was the first step in the required math-science curriculum for anyone heading to college. The ‘home ec’ class required a lot of stuff that wasn’t useful even then, like creating artistic place settings with linen napkins. That class also required the student’s parents to pay for a lot of cloth, because each girl was required to produce a blouse, a skirt with matching jacket and an apron.-Part of ‘home ec’ did involve learning to cook (although I don’t think anyone ever ate ‘Welch Rarebit’ outside of a home ec class). Naturally, no boys were ever allowed to take the cooking classes. It was not within the ability of the Pittsburgh Public School District, or probably any others at that time, to envision guys on their own and in need of the ability to cook their own healthy meals.-

When we reached 9th grade, we all had to take an aptitude test to see whether we should be directed toward ‘general’, ‘college’ or ‘vocational-technical’. I can remember one girl who placed highest of all of us in math and science. (Today, she’s a licensed civil engineer). Because she hadn’t taken ‘shop’, she was required to take both years of that class with the 7th and 8th grade boys, along with the regular math and science curriculum.-It wasn’t just toy and tool manufacturers who subscribed to stereotypes that didn’t benefit a lot of kids….

As someone who lives within walking distance of the Jewish community center where there were shootings this weekend, I am saddened by how little our world has changed over the years in terms of tolerating each other and avoiding hatred. Race, gender, sexual orientation— these are things which shouldn’t matter in the way we treat each other.

Does anyone know when (or if) Trudeau is coming back?

-That’s right, indoctrinate them early-What’s the difference between your viewpoint and that of the Taliban?

-That’s right joanie- start filling thier heads with nonsense early on-Your statement differs only in degree, not in type, from the statement made by the Taliban gunman who shot a schoolgirl in the head.

Marv, what on earth are you talking about? That’s such a one-dimensional caricature it’s ridiculous. If you’re trying to imply that a secular upbringing infused with a firm belief in egalitarianism constitutes a life of shallow consumerism and no family values, I’m sorry but you’re going to have to answer to millions and millions of people who don’t fit your shallow stereotype.

-I am incredibly grateful to God that my mother wasn’t in Joanie’s class-I hope you have no children. If your daughter wanted to be something in addition to a mother, or had no interest in raising children, she couldn’t count on your support or love. -Since you kept thanking a higher power for a mother unlike Joanie, no one can tell how you might react to a son who wants to emphasize his role as a father above all else. But I can’t imagine that you would be any more accepting of that than you would be of a daughter who doesn’t see herself as existing solely to homeschool her children.

wait a minute here – no Santa Claus?

Today, I’d think the girls would say, “TO BE PAID AS WELL AS BOYS!” Still a way to go on that one.

Like Joanie, I had to have a talk about gender roles. I was trying to teach my neighbor’s 4 year old daughter how to catch a ball and she said, “I’m a girl. I’m not suppose to catch a ball.” I told her she could still be a girl and know how to catch a ball.In the end, I learned more by just listening to her and not trying to mold her.

I was a kid when this strip first appeared, and I could have told Trudeau that “mommy” is NOT what most girls would have said back then. That’s more of a 1950s answer.

@TMO1During playtime in the 3rd grade (1972), I asked a girl what she wanted to do when she grew up. She said , “mommy.”“But that’s not a job,” I said. My mother and her sisters all held jobs, so I assumed it was normal for women to aspire to work outside the home.

Reminds me of the folk song “Daughters of Feminists” with the last line “just want to stick it to Mom.” :) (My apologies, I can’t remember who sings it, and I don’t know who wrote it.)

We didn’t “begin to condemn” those who wanted to be Mommies in the 50s — we’ve never had any respect for what we call “women’s work” — usually in a derogatory manner. And if we valued it, we would pay for it like all other industrialized countries do.

@lindz.coopNancy White (Daughters of Feminists)