women make change in the world
we will look at work outside the home, and understand how some occupations are seen to be more suitable for men than for women. We will also learn about how women struggle for equality.
Getting an education was, and still is, one way in which new Opportunities were created for women.
The different types of efforts made by the women’s movement to challenge discrimination in more recent years.
A lot of the children in Rosie Ma’am’s class drew women as
nurses and men as army officers. The reason they did this is because they feel that outside the home too, women are good at only certain jobs.
For example, many people believe that women make better nurses because they are more patient and gentle.
This is linked to women’s roles within the family. Similarly, it is believed that science requires a technical mind and girls and women are not capable of dealing with technical things.
Because so many people believe in these , many girls do not get the same support that boys do to study and train to become doctors and engineers. In most families, once girls finish school, they are encouraged by their families to see marriage as their main aim in life.
It is important to understand that we live in a society in which all children face pressures from the world around them. Sometimes, these come in the form of demands from adults. At other times, they can just be because of unfair teasing by our own friends. Boys are pressurized to think about getting a job that will pay a good salary. They are also teased and bullied if they do not behave like other boys.
Learning for change
Going to school is an extremely important part of life. As more and more children enter school every year, we begin to think that it is normal for all children to go to school. Today, it is difficult for us to imagine that school and learning could be seen as “out of bounds” or not appropriate for some children. But in the past, the skill of reading and writing was known to only a few. Most children learnt the work their families or elders did. For girls, the situation was worse.
In communities that taught sons to read and write, daughters were not allowed to learn the alphabet. Even in families where skills like pottery, weaving and craft were taught, the contribution of daughters and women was only seen as supportive. For instance in the pottery trade, women collected the mud and prepared the earth for the pots. But since they did not operate the wheel, they were not seen as potters.
In the nineteenth century, many new ideas about education and learning emerged. Schools became more common and communities that had never learnt reading and writing started sending their children to school. But there was a lot of opposition to educating girls even then.
Yet many women and men made efforts to open schools for girls. Women struggled to learn to read and write
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