Saturday, April 08, 2006

Stereotyping

I can't say enough about how much I am enjoying The Scroll. First, someone else besides me is remarking on the odd publications of the CBMW. Then there is a wonderful post about Dorothy Sayers and female stereotyping.

This really speaks to me. In most ways I am a very traditional women for my age, but I happen to find that technology is just as interesting, and considerably less complicated than knitting socks.

I don't do well in many of the tradition 'women's' things. I remember being asked to help with crafts and preparing dinners for different Christian events and programmes. I am not good at these things. I like crafts and dinners, but I am not particularly gifted in these areas. Nobody asks me to do these things any more. One gets a reputation I guess.

I also like knitting but I am not great at it. It is a social thing and I like it and I do it with the kids, but I am not particularly talented at knitting, handcraft design, art, music, gardening, or any of the traditional 'women's' things. How terrible I felt when I was once told that as a women I could contribute to the church by writing hymns. One might just as well tell a man to have a baby.

So when Dorothy Sayers "What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs," it soothes my soul.

2 comments:

bobbie said...

i too am finding much confirmation there, and here too - thank you!

i can cook, but never with an audience, can't sing, play piano (or write hymns) or am really gifted with tiny children. i am a dead loss to 'the church' if it restricts me to that box.

during my 9 years of infertility (all of which were spent in the brethren church) i had failed at the REAL purpose women were allowed on earth - procreation. those were desperate days indeed.

it's wonderful to be allowed to be a person now - so freeing. i too LOVE dorothy sayers, she is a light to me as she walked against the grain of the world she faced so many decades ago - what a pioneer she was.

Suzanne McCarthy said...

Mindy and Brandon WIthrow have some good writing that addresses this. They have had a similar experience.

Read this post carefully.

I find the stereotyping of the complementarian teaching to be very cruel.