From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!sdcattb!sdcarl!lin
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Title: 
Article-I.D.: sdcarl.2786
Posted: Mon Sep  6 11:28:18 1982
Received: Thu Sep  9 02:57:41 1982

On coed jokes - 
Was that you, Steve, who wrote the defense of the coed jokes?
Actually, I received many letters from men who agreed with
me and who were very supportive.

I don't see how you can defend something that can cause people
great amounts of pain.  What do you think it is like for women
to have to work with and go to classes with men who are of the
mentality of those who make such jokes, and worse yet, those who
actually harbor such attitudes?  Until the feminist movement it
was considered unfeminine and socially unacceptable for a woman
to study engineering.  When I studied at University of Pennsylvania
as an English literature major, there were only 12 women engineering
students in the entire university.  These women were considered
weird and were excluded from social life.  Can you inmagine the
pain they suffered just because they wanted to exercise their
inclination to pursue their natural talents in engineering? This
was 1967-71.  I have met older women in professional situations -
Many of the top women in engineering spent their young lives
alone, with no social lives.  They face growing old not having
had the social respect that equally intelligent men had.  Some
of them deal with it well. Some of them become consumed by
bitterness.  Now, after feminism has made it socially acceptable
for women to be engineers, some of these older women are finally
finding the respect they never had - people see them as having been
ahead of their time, instead of just as old maids.  The historical
exclusion of women from engineering (and, actually, I have heard
professors that in the postwar U.S. the Jews were excluded from
engineering also in most cases) served to keep women from having
the opportunity to have an economically viable occupation, other
than as model.  When people tell jokes such as the coed jokes,
this is the historical prejudice they play upon - and such
prejudice touches real people with real pain with they have
experienced or have known their friends to experience. Also
underlying these jokes is the attitude that women are supposed
to be beautiful and socially sophisticated.  Why can't women
have the right to be "nerds" too?
  

Furthermore, the use of the term "libbers" is insulting.
Feminists have fought for our rights since the nineteenth
century.  Women won the right to vote, and recently they
won the right to equal pay for equal work.  In some states
in the U.S. (such as Arizona) a woman was not allowed to
run for governor.  Now women have the right to run for political
office.  For those of you at Bell Labs, have you ever read
the forms for the Bell System Savings Plan?  On these forms
an employee authorizes payroll deductions for participation
in an investment funds.  In Louisiana a woman can not make
this authorization to invest her own paycheck without her husband's
signature.  Is one a "libber" to be a feminist and fight for the
E.R.A. so that women can invest their own earnings?

				Linda A. Seltzer