Maybe a Rerun?

I have just spent the better part of this early morning (4:30 A.M.) looking through my past posts to see if I ever blogged about my last day of junior high school.  I am sure that I wrote about this, but being rather casual about blog labels and being more cryptic than necessary with blog post titles, I could not find it.  Therefore, today you are in for a re-run.

I was reminded of my last day of junior school because of some of the comments in my prior post.  Some readers wondered why I was so passive in those situations.  Perhaps, some of it had to do with my being brain tired at the time, maybe I was a little intimidated by the elevated position of each of these rude men, but I actually think it was a more practical decision,  a decision of picking ones battles carefully.  I would not have changed them or the world much by a female outburst.  Remember those scenes in the bar where one man gets accidentally bumped by another and then the bumped man confronts the other man with a snarl and in-your-face response?  Well, the snarling one is the one who always comes off looking like the idiot or the ego-centric oaf while the person who did the bumping comes off as being apologetically distracted.  These men did not impact my job or my family...just that brief time at that moment.  I did not let them ruin my day either.

While I am not one of those in-your-face feminists, I have held my ground on issues when necessary and have tried to give that philosophy to my daughter.  OK...what does this have to do with my last day of junior high school and perhaps my very first feminist protest?

I went to school in the mid-1960's.  This was the first decade of drugs, sex and rock and roll.  It was also a decade of the beginning of the women's liberation movement.  Liberation from dishes and babies to working 50 hour weeks and then coming home to dishes and babies.  I went to a tiny school in a farming community in the mid-west, which was pretty much sheltered from all of this.  An out-of-wedlock pregnancy was the most shocking thing that happened there.  Pot had not moved into the small town culture and we had sock hops in the new gymnasium for our rock and roll experience.  Girls danced with girls and the guys stood around trying to look cool except for the bad boys who would sneak outside the gym for a smoke. 

The last day of school was only half a day and there were no formal classes.  We cleaned out our lockers, cleaned out various classrooms, ran errands for teachers, got our annuals and spent time getting them signed by classmates and talking about about starting high school in the fall.  The day was really a wash, and perhaps, that was why two of my best friends and I decided to shake it up a little.  We were thirteen and thus just becoming rebellious teenagers and women.   I wish that I could say I was the ring-leader, but one of the other girls has instituted the idea.  We had decided to wear jeans on the last day of school!  I felt it was a very practical idea since we had to spend time clean up dusty shelves and lockers.  But I also knew that it was against the school rules for girls to wear pants to school.  We lived in jeans on weekends, because we all lived on farms and had chores, but this public school required skirts or dresses.

I don't think my parents had a clue, because they said nothing when I left the house in neat dark blue jeans, white tennis shoes and a shirt.

We didn't make it past first period when the Home Economics teacher, a tremendously prim and proper little tornado standing 5 feet and weighing 100 pounds, came huffily into the classroom and announced that we would have to leave the school building!  When we asked her where we were supposed to go, she said to wait outside until "they" decided what they were going to do with us.  She glared and fussed and indicated that "This was going to go on our school record" as we carefully hid our smirking.  I do not think we knew what a quandary we had them in, because we were all top students and had held various leadership positions in the school.  But we were certainly having fun being rebellious, something that as "good" girls we had not considered before.

We sat on the lawn on a lovely June morning for about 20 minutes talking and defending our position to ourselves. We could see the principal and the Home Ec teacher standing at the office window looking at us and talking and we somehow knew that we had the upper hand.  The whole thing seemed more than ludicrous to us and that is probably what won the argument, the total idiocy of the idea.  I do not know if they called our parents, but I am sure that my friend's mother would have given them a real piece of her mind over being interrupted by something so insignificant.

While I am sure they had considered sending us home to change as the very least of what they could do, we finally were allowed to go back inside.  Within an hour we had forgotten we were in jeans as had all the other students and the last day of school continued without further event.  I wish I could say that this changed the dress code for the school, but it did not.  I don't think I was allowed to wear pants to class until college where crossing a snow filled campus pretty much demanded better leg cover.

Anyway, that was my first but not my last feminist protest movement.  (Chuckle.)