When my mother undertook this project in 1972, she was an experienced nursery school teacher who had just completed a Masters at Bank Street College of Education. She got the job at the WAA from a posting on a Bank Street bulletin board. She did not know she was a feminist until Letty Pogrebin, interviewing her for the job, asked her. (It may be a false memory, but as I recall, I asked the same question after she took the job, and my mother answered, after a brief pause, "Yes, I am.") The project began effectively as a listening tour at twenty-five daycare centers, and it reflects the common-sense, hands-on experience of nursery school teachers awakening to gross inequities they partly struggled against and partly promulgated day-by-day. Four of the childcare centers became pilot sites for a revamped curriculum.
The book reads well today. Its goals and methods, laid out in the Chapter 1 excerpt below, are moderate, common-sense and concrete, its archaisms relatively few. See for yourself.
In 1972, at the very beginning of its existence, the Women's Action Alliance began receiving mail from women all over the country who were concerned that their children were being forced into rigidly stereotyped roles, even in pre-school. The Alliance did some research into the problem and came to the conclusion that although people were working to reduce stereotyping at every other strata of education, virtually nothing was being done at the pre-school level. The Alliance felt strongly that non-sexist education should start at the beginning of a child's educational life rather than somewhere further up the line when much that had already been learned in a sexist way would have to be "relearned."
The Women's Action Alliance decided to undertake the development of a non-sexist early childhood program. It would free girls and boys of sex-role stereotyping and allow them to develop to their fullest potential, unhampered by societally imposed restrictions regarding appropriate behavior for each sex. The goals of the program were:
- To present men and women in a nurturing role so that children understand that people are free to choose their work from an enormous variety of options unhampered by sex typing. In many cases, we have presented men and women in counterpart jobs to underscore the fact that most jobs can be performed equally well by men and women.
- To encourage girls as well as boys to engage in active play and to encourage boys as well as girls to enjoy quiet play. In all media, girls are overwhelmingly presented as passive creatures watching boys at play, while boys are presented as always active, unflaggingly energetic dynamos.
