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‘What do you do, darling?’
‘If you’re doing an Arts degree, are you going to be a teacher?’
Questions of this kind are guaranteed to light a fire under the simmering pot of angry-soup between my stomach and my spine. It’s not that being asked about my work is insulting; it’s the instant and patronising familiarity of epithets letting me know that my answer will be met with head pats. It’s not that I don’t think teaching is an excellent career; it’s that it’s the only life imagined for young ladies with my social and educational positioning before we, I guess, get married (to fellas! with bigger careers!) and give up.
Actually, at twenty years of age, I’m building my own small business, thanks, while I complete my second tertiary qualification. I don’t think that’s anything particularly impressive or special; I think it’s indicative of individual direction and drive questions like this aren’t anticipating. I think it’s as worthy of the respect of older people I encounter as the doings of their contemporaries.
I know I ruffle a few feathers by expecting respectful treatment from people decades older than me. But I like a life in which I can approach everyone on respectful terms, and I expect something of the same back. I’m into making friends, not garnering some shallow and demeaning form of patronisation. If more young people got the kind of respect and encouragement while growing up like the kind I got from my mum, they’d be grasping more opportunities, too. And many are.
And I’d like to be able to talk about this without being pushed into either the stereotype of the whiny youth or that of the precocious and articulate young woman who is so unlike her peers. I’m a person, not a shining example or one of many disappointments. And neither are my contemporaries.
I’d be a rubbish teacher, but I’d like to write books, and edit them, and I’d like to be a mum. It is a small life I am carving out for myself, and it is shaping up to be a satisfying one. I nourish small and closely-held dreams. Not a chance to impress or satisfy the expectations of other people.
Most of the male arts students I know *also* get asked if they’re going to teach. I think that one goes beyond gender into the vocational mindset associated with higher education and particularly higher education policy in the late 20th/early 21st century. Average Joe can’t conceive of anything else one could *do* with an Arts degree.
Yeah, they are told that, to be sure. But given that it’s mostly women doing the Arts degrees, I think gender’s also a pretty solid part of the deal. (Also there’s a hilarious comic strip about English majors you’ll have to remind me to find for you.)
I think it probably goes the other way, though – that women tended, in the stereotype-forming period of higher education, to enrol in Arts degrees because the limited professions available to them were ones which an Arts degree prepared you for. And things like the gender imbalance in the *teaching* profession these days would also be contributing there.
When I get questions about the arts side of my double degree ( I am a gender studies major), my exasperation stems from the fact that my questioner thinks arts degrees are completely devoid of ANY vocational end, and that therefore the degree is useless. It’s just not intelligible to them that I do arts–> gender studies to be a better person, to learn to treat others more ethically, to expand my entire outlook on life etc. etc. So to me the benefits of doing an arts degree and specialising in this area are obvious, but the rigidity of the capitalistic ‘you go to uni to get paid employment’ mindset of the questioner is just so ingrained that I can’t even be bothered explaining that the way this degree has changed my life cannot be quantified by money or a career. There’s just not enough spoons for some people unfortunately.
That is no fun. And kind of what I was trying to get at in my comments yesterday: it’s about the gendered correlation with uselessness, rather than any causation. I don’t think that quite makes sense, but hopefully what I mean comes across…!
I used to always think the people asking me if, with my math degree, I planned to teach, just didn’t understand that there was still new math being developed all the time. I’d excitedly babble about how calculus is only a few hundred years old, how we’re just a few steps beyond that and how I’m going to invent new maths!
Now I wonder, why do I see my boyfriend with a math degree always being asked, not, “will you teach?” but, “are you going into finance? Business? Computers?” how I ever believed that people just saw math as a useless degree…
Ah, yes the ‘art degree interrogation.’ I double majored in art and psych and I finally stopped mentioned my art degree. Depending on the job I’m applying for, I even drop it from my resume, even though my art classes were often harder than my psych classes so I am proud to have an art degree. I just hate the questions and the pitying looks. Now I’m in grad school in a field that requires both degrees, I can more easily explain, but still sometimes I don’t want to play 20 questions. You have my sympathy.
I was going to say that as a female math major I am asked the same question often, but I see pkle has already done that for me!