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