childhood

I’m not sure how it can be so that I’m old enough to remember a time when women weren’t welcome in the workplace, when they were expected to stay in the home and take care of the children and the cleaning, when they were supposed to keep their mouths shut, when they were not only not taken seriously, but were ridiculed for the very notion that they might have independent thought. I’m not sure how it is that I was actually a part of not the first, but it seems the second wave of women entering a work force where non-discrimination was the battle cry – the battle cry but far, far away from accomplishment. I’m not sure how it could be possible that I can remember all those commercials that made women stupid, that made a woman’s prime reason for existence to make her family happy, that made women simply sexual objects – but only as long as they were pretty and young. But I do. I lived this.

In the same vein, I remember childhood as a distinctly different experience than what I see children living through these days. My childhood seems just a few seconds removed from the childhood when a good toy was a board with a nail in it. We had toys. But the most our dolls did was wet themselves. Dolls were babies. It wasn’t until Barbie came along that dolls became adults with lives, and careers, and plans of their own. The television we watched was for adults – the Max Fleischer cartoons were a terrifying peek into his nightmare where children wandered into the forest and were accosted by trees that bounced and danced ominously in time to the threatening classical music and hurled apples at the backs of the few children who tried to escape. Gumby and Pokey were virulent racists, making sarcastic double entendre insults to the redface Indians they visited. The highest tech toy we had was Mr. Machine – a plastic man about 18 inches high wearing a top hat and showing his totally non-functional assembly of gears and buttons through his flat transparent body. Our playgrounds had no soft landings, steel cage jungle jims, and working concrete water fountains.