Not a Fan: Congressman

The backstory: On Instagram, I follow a woman named Jen Hatmaker.  She lives in Austin, Texas and writes about her life as a wife, mother, and Christian.  On the face of it, we don’t have much in common, but I like her sensibility and her sense of humor.  From her, I’d adopted the idea of an occasional rant about the small annoyances in life.  She calls her rants “Not a Fan” and that rather sums it up, so my occasional rants will also arrive under that title.

Today's "Not a Fan" rant is about the gender neutral titles.  Are you using the phrase Congressman? Cut that shit out.

I have spent my adult life teaching about American government and I have always made sure to use gender neutral descriptions of elective office.  it’s an important distinction that signals to girls and boys that these are positions that can be occupied by both women and men.  Some titles are gender neutral on their own: President, Senator, Supreme Court Judge, Governor.  They have an association with men, of course, whether because men have exclusively served in the positions (looking at you, President) or because men have most often occupied the roles (looking at you, every other office in America).

Women have made the greatest progress in elective office is positions in the state legislatures and the House of Representatives and we need to reflect that progress by being sure to use gender-free descriptions of those positions.  It’s not a Congressman; it’s a member of Congress and the title is Representative.  If your state legislature has an Assembly, don’t call a representative an Assemblyman.  Go for Representative or member of the Assembly.

Train yourself to be inclusive by default and imagine all the little girls (and boys!) who grow up to believe that there is no limit to their political aspirations.  Then, when we elect our first woman president (and that had damn well better be in my lifetime), you’ll know that you played a part in the achievement.

The Things We Don't Discuss

In my work with young women, I spend a lot of time treating their minds as equal to the minds of the young men in my classroom.  In other words, I hold boys and girls to the same standards, as well I should.  However, this Mother Jones graphic representation of gender equality in the social world drawn from a recent UN Report conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media suggests that I am living in a dream world.

In conducting my classroom as an egalitarian place, I may be doing the girls in my care a disservice.  I am certainly not preparing them for the real world.  Because the real world is a place where young women will be judged by the quality of their backsides and not their ideas, where they will find that their minds are sometimes not as valuable as their cleavage, a place where they will be required to work twice as hard for half the professional rewards that will more easily accrue to their male peers.  Those are the hard and real facts of life in 2012.

As a feminist of long-standing, I've been thinking about this for quite some time.  My largely unsuccessful campaign against "you guys" is part of my effort to combat stereotypes of girls.  But my careful decision to never gender my expectations of leadership or status seems almost quaint in light of the UN report.  And I find myself feeling disheartened and less willing to think in terms of how far we've come but more in terms of how far we must still travel.

Sigh.

Speaking My Mind

Rebecca Solnit has an awesome piece up at Mother Jones and I'm linking to it here both to encourage y'all to read it and also to keep it handy for those times when a man explains to me that "you guys" includes us all.  Or maybe I'll re-read it when a man patiently explains to me that I don't understand something.  Perhaps I'll print up a copy for emphasis the next time I have to explain why equal pay for equal work is important to our daughters and our sons.

Quite honestly, I expect this essay to come in very handy almost every week of my life.  And I"ll be damned if that isn't one of the most depressing facts of 21st century life.

The War Against Girls

The next time someone tells me that it's okay to say "you guys" when you are speaking of a group that includes girls....the next time that someone complains when I use the word "frosh" when speaking of 9th graders....or suggests that they don't understand what I mean when I use the phrase "under-class members" when I am speaking of what was traditionally called "under classmen"...or suggests in some other subtle way that I'm just being overly sensitive when I talk about gender inclusion,  I am going to direct them to go and watch "It's a Girl" or read about it here.

There are 200 million missing little girls in this world, victims of infanticide driven by a patriarchal worldview.

And that is not okay.