I caught a fascinating clip on Facebook over the
weekend from a 1961 Australian interview show called “Women’s World.” (The clip
is below.) The topic is at hand is Education for Married Women, i.e., whether
or not it’s a waste for married women to be educated. It provides an
interesting glimpse into the mindset of the time, but it wasn’t the topic itself
that interested me, it was contrast between the two women being interviewed: Chipper, ambitious pharmaceutical chemist Jean, and vaguely misanthropic
champion of underachievement, Toni, who is trained as a kindergarten teacher.
Jean is clearly energetic and bright, but I find Toni strangely likable. I don’t
agree with her ideas—Toni insists that a university education makes women
unhappy, “fogs” their minds up with nonsense, and overstimulates them, making
them loathe to perform their proper duty to stay home with children. She
further opines that children are given far too much homework and that they
should leave the books at school and just come home and watch the telly.
When Jean points out that there is a danger of
housewives getting stuck in a “nice little rut” where they don’t want to bother
with anyone else, Toni huffs “Well, that’s best thing that can happen to a
woman, in my opinion.” Clearly not career-oriented, Toni’s only regret is that
she never learned to type, so if her husband died, she’d have to go teach kindergarten
again and she’s getting a little old for that. Of the two, Toni seems like she
would be far more fun to hang out with. Toni would whip up a batch of warm
chocolate chip cookies, pour you a cold glass of milk, and tell you stop tiring
your mind with intellectual nonsense. She’d have all the best gossip and call
people fools a lot. And I don’t know for sure, but I suspect she’s really into
detective shows. Jean is lovely, but as a no-getter myself, Toni would be my
top choice to pal around with.
Speaking of no-getting, I have no New Year’s
Resolutions, as per usual. I think they are a terrible idea. (I bet you Toni would
agree.) But I did get off my as-of-late sedentary buttocks this morning to go
swimming and see if I could shake some of stiffness out of my left leg. What
used to be a left-knee issue seems to have turned into a whole-left-leg issue.
The other night I woke up with spasms in a lateral muscle I then had to go look
up the name of. It was a bit bizarre. It took about ten minutes to calm it
down, and it seems to have come out of nowhere. The swimming helped, but the
aches came back once I got on dry land again. Maybe my New Year’s Resolution
should be to get a massage every week.
However, I may need to rethink my no-getterness
when it comes to writing, because I recently had a dream about the Egyptian god
Thoth. He wrote a message on a scroll for me and was very insistent that I read
it. In the space between dreaming and waking, I was desperately trying to
remember the message, but of course it was gone the second I woke up. I do not
why I was visited by Thoth. I had to go and look him up because I had no memory
of who he was in the Egyptian pantheon. It turns out that among other things, Thoth
was the patron of scribes and of the written word. He maintained the library of
the gods, was said to have created himself through the power of language, and
wrote a song that created the eight deities of the Ogdoad. So I was visited by
the one of the big dogs, and I don’t care who thinks that’s loopy, I believe in
paying attention to that kind of stuff.
Here’s the clip from the interview. Fascinating
stuff when looked at from today’s perspective:
--Kristen McHenry
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