Isms
When I went to the hospital about my foot last week, I was seen in casualty by a nurse-practitioner. Later, when I was telling the rest of the family about it, I mentioned that he’d been male. Freddy gave me one of those withering how-can-you-not-know-this looks, and said, in one of those how-can-you-not-know-this voices, “That’s called a doctor.” Further discussion demonstrated that he thought that all doctors were male and all nurses were female.
Now Freddy is not the most enlightened/liberal of my children. He dislikes (sometimes intensely) all things girly - in fact it makes it very easy to wind him up 
For months before his birthday, every time we walked past the camping shop in our local shopping centre, I told him I was buying him the tent on display for his birthday - this one - and every single time, he nearly fell over at the thought 
But his obvious disbelief when I told him that no, doctors could be male or female, and so could nurses, was a bit more… um… well, I wasn’t happy about it!
This evening at dinner, we got into a discussion about what men and women could do. We started off talking about Harry Potter (as you do ;-)) and who was going to die in the next book, but somehow got sidetracked into a lengthy discussion about sexism, racism and other -isms. Freddy wasn’t really convinced that any of it mattered, until I started giving lots of examples of what many people used to believe (and in some cases, what some people still believe) - most of which had my children gaping open-mouthed with incredulity that, for example, there are people who still hold to the belief that women can’t be good drivers, or that men can’t cook, etc. Eventually, I think they understood that if we want to have the right to make our own choices in life, we must afford the same right to others.
Now if only I can convince the rest of the country…
Posts
Ooo it so must be the age. I went into T’s classroom to help in ICT the other week and there was a list on the board about occupatons categorised into male, female and both. Male was stuff like miner, engineer, scientist, builder and on the female side was teacher, nurse, cleaner.
I didn’t unfortunately get to tackle anyone about it but I have been making sure to have similar conversations as yours with T. Maybe when you are 7 you like to be completely linear in your job expectations!
Well you know how Thomas was telling me (in the same tone as Freddy I would imagine) ‘Womans don’t go to work!’
It is amazing to see their innocent reactions when you tell them about some of the messed up beliefs that people have had or still have. I love how Lady is thoroughly confused when I tell her about the troubles that have infected our region for so long. She just doesn’t see why people would act like that about people just like them.