re: #64 Targetpractice

It’s one of those things that makes me so amused by guys like Matt, they pine for the very thing they sneer and deride in “less-civilized” cultures: The idea of arranged marriages and treating sex as a commodity. They will point to Muslim-majority countries and declare America “better” because women can receive an education, but secretly they rage that such education in the West involves topics other than homemaking and pleasing a man. They want a return to a time when an education was viewed as “wasted” on a woman, that she was just going to “end up” pregnant and then her future would be spent raising children and tending the home.

When my mother started law school in 1952, there were exactly 3 women in the entire first year. One of her professors spent time at the beginning of each and every class berating her and the other 2 for taking up space that should have gone to a man who’d have a family to support. He found it unconscionable that those places were wasted on women who’d just end up getting married and not even practicing law ever. Another of her professors announced that he wouldn’t be calling on any of the women during class discussions, and he’d mark down any men who included those women in their study groups (“they’ll distract you, and your work will suffer for it”).

In 1970, when she’d been in practice for years and was named partner at her firm… she still couldn’t have a bank account or apply for a credit card without dad’s signature.