“The immigrants’ daughters had been educated for this kind of work in commercial and secretarial courses in high school.”
Previously we have spoken about people not being given the right to have education, in this piece these women are given some sort of education. However, the education they are being offered is not one that gives them the opportunity to branch out to another field but preparing them for a job tied to their gender. Teaching women how to be secretaries while their brothers and the other men around them do other jobs and have the potential to getting to the job they want. Even though these women are given education, it is one that still wants them to be “smart enough to do this but not smart enough to do anything more” However, we still see these ideas play out today, where when people think of the “teachers’, they think of women, when they hear the word “firefighter” they think of a man. It shows how society constructed the idea of how jobs should match up with gender.
** more to be added.
Source:Robert A. Orsi, “Hopeless Causes and Things Despaired Of” in Thank You, St.Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p 41
Chronicles of a Latina 