RIGHTS-EDUCATION: Women’s Role Finally Recognised in Textbooks

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 1 1999 (IPS) - Primary school text books in Argentina are finally recognising the radical change in the role of women in society.

Gender equality has come a long way, particularly in the last 10 years, since the start of the 20th century when Argentina seemed incapable of such change.

“Is Mama Kneading the Dough?” – a book written by sociologists Catalina Wainerman and Mariana Heredia – discusses these changes and has added to the debate on forms of education in this country.

The authors see a “gigantic” change in the image of adult women as portrayed by the latest scholastic textbooks.

From the model of an ‘ideal” woman – repeated endlessly for more than seven decades – women today have become much more “real,” the authors found.

Wainerman explained that, in the books of the 1980s, and especially in those published in the 1990s, “the secular litany ceased” to regard women in a purely domestic role, while giving men the responsibility of being the economic providers of the family.

“Now there are many more ‘flesh and blood’ fathers and mothers” and a diversity of family groups…”The gap between the social reality and schoolbooks is closing,” he said.

The two authors began their research with the idea that cultural, as well as economic, reasons had pushed women into the labor market. The idea was to describe the changes in values, ideas and behavior.

Heredia and Wainerman started by analysing the institutions that disseminated ideas, among them schools. Textbooks then emerged as sources of a great number of ideological messages, moral values and models of identification.

One of the main factors that drove them to study more than 140 textbooks from various publishers was the endless reiteration of certain content and language from the start of the century until the 1970s. “They stressed only one message, in an elite monopoly of ideas,” said the experts.

For example a 1910 school book reads: “Through playing at washing, ironing and cooking, little girls learn and grow fond of many domestic chores, which can be useful or necessary later in life.”

Two decades later, another book noted that “little girls should be patient and industrious like the ant; work without calling attention to themselves and not speak unless they are asked a question,” quite different from the “restless, energetic” boy depicted in the same tome, who is an “excellent student.”

By the 1950s, clothing worn by illustrated characters had adapted to that period, but the context and discourse depicted in text books was almost a carbon copy of the previous century: The father reads the newspaper, the mother sews, the daughter plays with a doll and the son plays with a car, blocks or a “Meccano” construction set.

Those models “had a definite effect” on boys and girls, the authors contend. Even if there was a different message in actual homes, it was hard to resist the constant barrage of where men and women stood in society.

“Is Mama Kneading the Dough?” they note that in the social reality of the last 20 years, more women work and study, and many women hold positions in professions previously considered for “men only” – such as engineering, medicine and journalism.

In 1993, the Federal Education law recommended eliminating “discriminatory stereotypes in teaching materials,” including those of gender, which obliged teachers to set aside old ideology and face the new social reality.

That reality, to a certain extent, start to be reflected in textbooks, which were less governed by strict state control than the editorial policies that competed to win the favor of teachers with more attractive lectures.

Thus, girls text books now portray girls able to play sports and show qualities previously only attributed to men – intelligence, curiosity, courage, initiative and a thirst for adventure. They also show children with emotional problems and disabilities, who participate normally in work around the house.

In the new books, it is not unusual to see a father changing diapers, boys cooking and girls sharing their same games, while there is also greater reflection of the cultural (rather than natural) origin of different behaviours.

Notwithstanding this advance, “the double workload” of women who must do housework when they get home from their jobs continues to persist in text books. It is reflected as “reality” without offering alternative models, Wainerman said.

Men today are more involved in raising children than the previous generation, and women are more incorporated into the global labor force than their mothers were, but the responsibility for housework continues to fall heaviest on women, he added.

The authors of the study also found that in recent years, the old “moralism” that used to fill textbooks has been abandoned. Already, there are no examples of individual or civic behaviour, nor are there qualities linked to ethics or work.

Children today are “flesh and blood” instead of “miniature adults,” as they were earlier portrayed. Parents sometimes pay scant attention to their children, as they are busy with work, preoccupied or engaged in a recreational activity.

The book notes, as well, that today psychology is pushing out ideology, diversity is replacing homogeneousness, permissiveness is replacing coercion, personal happiness outweighs obligation, and feelings are more important than duty — and these changes can be seen in the books, sustain Heredia and Wainerman.

“I don’t like to speak in terms of good or bad, but I don’t think it is helpful to put so much emphasis on work and values or to over-emphasise entertainment – labelling anything that requires effort as ‘boring’,” warned Wainerman.