Not about the election!

[marshtide]

Today: trying again with this whole attending school thing.

Random links, largely in some way Val's fault (though the first one just showed up on my reading list):

1. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't think men taking an equal role in raising children is actually quite so much of a firmly entrenched idea in Sweden as people maybe imply/wish, given the issues with getting guys to for example actually take as much paternity leave as they're entitled to, but I definitely had a burst of surprise when I arrived at how common it was to see a guy going around by himself with a small child in a buggy. It made me double-take - and this despite the fact that my dad spent pretty much the same amount of time looking after me and my brother when we were kids as my mum did. I guess the thing is, in a rural part of the UK at that point in time, that was weird. And this seems to be normal.

(Val has also mentioned a couple of times that there is training here for preschool teachers to try and counter the way gender roles are enforced in without people even being aware of what they're doing. While we're on gender roles. I haven't gone and looked it up and read up on the details but doesn't that sound amazing?)


2. Here is an article about women's football. It's from a Swedish feminist magazine, so sorry if you can't read the actual text, but the reason I'm linking it is in fact mostly the photos. Aren't they great?


3. Name to remember, which I've just found written on a post-it note and stuck to one of my notebooks: Marianne Breslauer. German photographer, Weimar republic. Just look at this stuff!

Comments

[ten]

there is training here for preschool teachers to try and counter the way gender roles are enforced in without people even being aware of what they're doing

That is so cool!


(I have that Ikea catalogue, and while I wasn't surprised by the two first ads (I think Germany is not quite as gendered in that context as America), I remember the third one surprising me a little, in its utter 'gentle domestic-ness'.)

[marshtide]

Isn't it just!

Yeah, while the UK often feels like it's got more cultural similarities with the US than the rest of Western Europe has. So even though Swedish people I know point out that there are pretty big problems (which is absolutely true) it still feels very progressive to me in many respects...

[jetsam]

Is that saying that they played in England in 1921 but were banned from clubs/matches til 1965, when they were Preson LFC?

Very cool :)

[marshtide]

Yup. :)

[antisoppist]

I think the dads with buggies thing is changing in the UK too. When I was a child it wasn't done at all but in my bit of rural England now you see it quite a lot. I had 5 dads coming to the playgroup I used to run from time to time (not many but it's a start) and we've also got quite a few couples where the men are working a 3 or 4 day week and splitting the childcare. They do tend to work in the public sector though. My husband in private sector IT has never worked anywhere that allows flexible working.

At least Sweden has the paternity leave entitlement even if they're not taking it up. When we had our first child in 2001, my husband got *two days* off. By the time the third was born in 2007, paternity leave had gone up to two weeks. Britain has a very long way to go.

I was also impressed when I went to pick up the youngest from nursery the other day to see two 2 year-old boys delightedly wearing pink flamenco dresses with black spots on from the dressing up box. Possibly the staff have been reading Swedish manuals.

[marshtide]

I'm glad to hear it's changing a bit! :) I know a fair few people were horrified when my dad stayed at home with my half-brother a few years ago. I mean, he didn't have a job at the time, but you know! Man! Baby! Oh god! - I think/hope the attitude has got less prevalent but it's not dead yet...

Cool. :D

[madelienegrey]

I would love to see that kind of thinking encouraged in the U.S. The way it's done here, though, is to sort of shame fathers into doing more (of course, there's an explosion of deadbeat dads), and I wish there was more encouragement from the ground up, but gender roles are still so firmly entrenched here, that people just crap themselves when they come across a genderqueer person who doesn't fit the mold, or a father who stays at home, or anything that doesn't fit the 1950's eastern American way. :/

[annotated_em]

Oh, I love the idea of training preschool teachers to counteract the gendering stuff.

I was really taken aback the other day when one of my cohort, who is pregnant and ought to know better, was talking about baby clothes and colors and basically came down on the side of "you don't want anyone to misgender your baby so girls wear pink and boys wear blue!"

It was all I could do not to say something. (Which would have been deeply impolitic of me, sadly.)

[alphaviolet]

There was an article about men's changing roles in Newsweek (in the U.S.) this month too. It surprised me.

[eggcrack]

Teachers being taught to detect and counter gender roles! That is so damn cool!

Also awesome are those women football players. What a group of badasses!