There's a Good Girl by Marianne Grabrucker

Even if we try and control the media in our lives, and the conversations in our own home, the presence of limiting gender ideas and biases will somehow soak through. Gender inequality permeates every bit of our culture, every single industry.

I guess all it takes is one game of Hospitals and one snippet of conversation from some older kids and BAM, her feminist spirit begins gurgling out of the bottom of her Spider Man trousers.īecause however conscious and determined we are as parents to allow our children to grow into whoever they want to be, regardless of gender, we simply can’t balance out a whole skewed society. I regularly consider our lives and my own role modelling, making sure we have strong female leaders about us and having conversations about how all attributes and all colours and all toys are for all children.Īnd then she comes out with that, the day before International Women’s Day, for goodness sake. How on earth had this happened and where had this come from?Īll those fairytales I have done a cut and paste job on in order to place females in significant roles, all the times I change “He” to “She”, all those stereotyped films we have boycotted, all the princess clothes we have avoided.

It is a pretty big thing, eh? For a little child to feel that the most responsible, highest paid role within a medical team isn’t for her because she has the wrong genitalia? Wailing over my toddler’s lost sense of gender equality, the death of her ambition, shedding my tears upon her liberation, imprisoned in a casket. You know that most tragic of movie scenes, the one in My Girl at the funeral and Macauly Culkin is in the coffin and the little girl comes in and cries all over him saying “Where are his glasses? He can’t see without his glasses!” Well, that was pretty much me. She went on to clarify “I have to be the Nurse, ‘cos I’m the girl, and he’s a Doctor, ‘cos he is a boy.” “Right, now, you be the patient, I will be the nurse and he will be the Doctor.” Yesterday three year old Ramona was carefully and patiently directing the game of Hospitals.

There's a Good Girl by Marianne Grabrucker