Challenging Protocol

I was the first girl to take mechanical drawing. It wasn’t a political statement, although it was the beginning of the era of young women bucking the “normal” protocol. I wanted to draw buildings. I thought I would become an architect. That was before I realized how much it would cost in education to become an architect. Fortunately, at a small school, no one told me I couldn’t take the class. No one, not even the boys made me feel uncomfortable being the only girl in the class. That does seem odd in thinking back, but I was so intently focused on drawing, I might not have noticed. But not one boy every took our Home Economics classes. I don’t believe we even had a boy in our typing class. At least today, that isn’t the case. Gender specific education in high school is virtually unheard of.  We have girls playing football, boys learning to cook and girls learning woodshop. It is marvelous have the times have changed and we have learned to remove the boundaries of gender in education as well as in sports and even career paths. We might have a long way to go, but we have climbed mountains in the past forty years by comparison to the previous forty. We have so much more work to do though, it is only a beginning.