Tonight's #VintageMagTweets come from this excellent 1976 book, 'Just Like a Girl'. If you're a fan of Simone de Beauvoir's quotation, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", you'll enjoy this.

First, the author looks back into the history of girls' education.

It might seem a long time ago, but it's important to understand this background because it shaped teaching attitudes right into the 80s.

"...and for girls, housewifery."

Remember, at the time, women were allowed to attend some universities but were not allowed degree status at the end, even if their marks were higher than the men's.

Mathematics should be kept to a minimum for ladybrains as they don't need it.

Isn't this EXACTLY what we're still seeing on children's T shirts today?

Bingo! I hope @PhilipPullman is listening. *This* is what de Beauvoir means.

"The gentle, demure, sensitive, submissive, non-competitive, sweet-natured and dependent dream-girl is not going to get very far...with...equality."

Unicorns, hearts and mermaids, anyone? https://twitter.com/volewriter/status/1170363927491948544

Meanwhile, boys' expectations are somewhat different. 1 of 2:

2 of 2. Yes, it's just bad luck that the skills girls and women have "naturally" prepare them for the lowest-paid jobs.

And this is still the case.

This was the state of play in 1976. And it's STILL largely the state of play in 2020, as we see from the @LetToysBeToys campaign.

I'll pause the thread there and add some more on Sunday night. x

This is what was happening in the 70s: girls being fobbed off with toys that showed their role was to wait on others.

And that last line is crucial: boys and girls both hearing the clear, strident signal that THESE toys were for boys, and THOSE toys were for girls.

Recognition of blue and pink comes long before reading in a child's development.

Toys for boys often promote strategic thinking.

Or, I should say, toys marketed at boys.

This is interesting: in a society where males nurture the infants, it's the boys who play with dolls, not the girls.

If children are told they ought to be excited by a particular type of toy, most of them will follow that cue.

Children are taught that boys have different interests and limits than girls.

I've heard variations of this conversation so many times.

In fact, I'll be honest, I've fallen into this trap myself: realised I was commenting to the little girls I met about their hair or shoes, whereas I was asking little boys what they'd been up to lately.

Nowadays I ask them all what they've been reading or playing with.

I once heard an adult hail two children as they walked down the street. 'Good morning, sir,' the adult said to the little boy. 'And how are you?' Then turned to the girl and said, 'What gorgeous hair you have!' The boy was 2 years younger than the girl, but he got to be Sir.

For all it's 2020 I think this still goes on in lots of households. I see it in the classroom where, almost invariably, it's girls who rush to volunteer for wiping tables/sorting pencils, boys who skip off outside to play. That comes from what they're expected to do at home.

This is spot on. I didn't realise I was talking to boys and girls differently till I thought about it. So many adults genuinely think they're just responding to 'natural, innate biases'.

I agree with this too: in general, boys *are* policed more closely than girls to make sure they only choose from the "right" sort of toy or activity. Some parents are disgusted and appalled if their boy tries to take something they've decided is "for girls".

That's because it's seen as a step down for a boy to behave 'like a girl', whereas for a girl to behave 'like a boy' is a promotion.

"a typical boy" because he's violent. This kind of comment breaks my heart, and you still hear it today.

The relative status of male and female in society.

I still hear this, too.

And this behaviour here damages so many boys and young men, still.

The Americans tried to nail it down with "science". Too many Unacceptable things on your son's checklist? Take action!

How incredibly sinister.

More from 'Just Like a Girl' now in #VintageMagTweets.

How children of both sexes learn to behave in a gendered way:

I bet we've all witnessed adults openly directing girls away from 'boy' things and vice versa. But the pressures can be extremely subtle too, and coming at kids from all directions.

Children imitate, they look for guidance on how adults expect them to behave.

We've seen this before: the way in which adults were depicted in children's reading schemes and in many of their free-reader fiction books too.

How fiction often reinforced these stereotypes. You might hope things had got better 50 years on, but there's still a tremendous bias in children's fiction towards making the hero male.

This is interesting, because a few days ago I commented favourably on toy packaging in Lidl showing boys & girls playing together. But in two of the four boxes, the boys were holding the controller & the girl was looking on. (In the other two, neither child held the controls.)

So have we moved on much, in fact?

A regular theme in little girls' comics: how they should be helping others.

Was there a boys' equivalent? Take a wild guess.

The female is the nurse and the male the doctor, obviously.

Just the names tell you so much.

Vroom.

Helping, Struggling and Feeling make up the girls' domain.

Girls have to have sympathetic personalities.

Boys read about adult men making their way energetically through the world, without restriction.

Girls work within a much more confined landscape.

Females don't feature much in stories for boys.

This attitude is still HUGE in publishing and in some areas of education. The idea is, boys don't want to read stories about female characters, so shouldn't be forced to in case it "puts them off reading". No one seems to have tested this or asked the boys themselves.

Actually, in publishing it's not just boys they worry will be put off books featuring females, it's grown men. Marketing divisions have to signal very clearly that a book is FOR WOMEN because it's ABOUT A WOMAN, in case a man accidentally picks it up and his brain explodes.

I wish I were joking about that, but I'm not.

"Men won't read books by women," they say. Well, I wonder where that all starts??

The main thing was that, in girls' comics, the females learned their lesson.

Pausing there. I'll add some more on Sunday.

More on the Just Like a Girl #VintageMagThreads now.

Here's territory a lot of are familiar with.

A good point about readership being way beyond the recorded circulation figures. I was Never Allowed such magazines as a girl, but I just read them in school.

It's true that the final frame is almost always either a couple in an embrace, or a lone young woman looking regretful because she's lost out on romance.

Yup.

I didn't know about this, and it's astonishing: pre-teen girls being told outright that women were not equal to men.

(As an aside, the Magic Circle didn't allow women to be members until 1991!)

Silly Libby. How could she think she was as good as a male magician?

Here's another story about how daft girls are to want equality. Indoctrinate 'em while they're young, eh?

And yet another story about how women who want equality are ridiculous and wrong and need to be taught a lesson. At the end of this very long synopsis, which I've not reproduced here, silly Sue is shown the error of her ways by some aliens.

The next phase for female readers.

Meanwhile, boys go on reading comics for longer than girls.

And then they go on to single-interest hobby magazines like music, audio tech, fishing, sport.

The miss out on all the anxiety-inducing propaganda of women's mags, the relentless 'you're never-good-enough' messages.

Typical advert text in a girls'/woman's magazine of the time:

Other messages for young adult women include:

Meanwhile, the realty for women in the late 60s and 70s was often this:

I'll pause it there because the next section is about how girls' access to education is affected by gender stereotyping.

I'll just add a few of those romance stories before I go.

Those certainly are fearful eyes.

"You really do need a man about."

(Is it me, or is there something really sinister about these snowmen?)

Easily pleased.

More on Thursday. See you then.

More on the #VintageMagTweets thread now, based on the book 'Just Like a Girl', and this section looks at education in the 70s.

Although, obviously, some of the clippings deal with the preceding decades.

The frustration of being denied the chance to study useful and ultimately lucrative subjects.

In my school, which was supposed to be fairly progressive, you couldn't do tech drawing at O level. One of my peers fought to be allowed to study the subject, and eventually was allowed to go next door to the boys' school for lessons.

This is how girls begin, which makes it all the more marked that they generally earn so much less than males when the leave school.

The choosing of subjects. The situation is not that much different fifty years on. There were no girls in my son's 2018 A level computer science classes at his large comprehensive, and none in his physics.

And that's why we've failed to make any real impact.

We're still being told that girls are just 'naturally' poor at maths and science, tech and engineering. It's their Ladybrains, see.

The biases inflicted on previous generations don't disappear overnight.

And the problem is, women and girls often believe these false limitations. I know educated women who claim girls are just 'naturally' unsuited to STEM subjects.

Here's the result of being told your sex has innate weaknesses.

This is striking: the reasons girls gave for the careers they were interested in. See if you can spot a pattern.

What have girls been told they're good at? What particular strength have they been allowed to have?

Why on earth would a woman want to be an engineer?

This is really really sad.

On Sunday, when I'll finish the thread, I'll post some quotes from girls about why they thought they couldn't manage certain jobs. Be prepared to have steam coming out of your ears.

Here's the last section of the #VintageMagTweets thread from the book 'Just Like a Girl'.

Some comments from female pupils about why they felt they couldn't choose certain career paths.

(Actually, loads of people prefer female driving instructors to male, for a variety of reasons.)

(And a reminder that universities in the 70s had quotas for female students - no more than 15-20% on each course - and that girls were required to get higher grades than boys.)

Females just too fragile.

Those arguments were used to try to keep unequal pay, of course.

Misogyny is always miserable to encounter, but to hear this internalised misogyny is really upsetting.

It really does, especially when, in the 80s, sexual harassment went largely unchecked and was used to try to dislodge thousands of women from their jobs.

In other words, they have the confidence pushed out of them from childhood onwards.