Monday, July 16, 2007

Where's the "Equal" In Equal Rights?

Yesterday afternoon during our regularly scheduled Sunday afternoon social time, Diva Stacy and I watched another exciting episode from the first season of "Police Woman".  We get a kick out of seeing the 70s clothing and hearing the lingo they used back in the day.  For instance, in the episode we watched yesterday afternoon, they used the money term "bread" 2 or 3 times.  We also saw something in yesterday's episode that disturbed us - in one scene, they showed a classroom of Catholic school children, probably 2nd or 3rd graders, who had gone on a walking field trip from the school down to the police station.  The girls were wearing the old school blue and white plaid Catholic school jumpers with white blouses, while the boys wore normal civilian clothes.  It made us both think WTF? 

This episode was set and filmed in the mid-70s - 1974 to be exact - after the civil rights movement and at the height of the women's lib movement, so you'd think there would have been equality for all of the Catholic school children, but evidently not.  The girls were forced to wear uniforms while the boys could wear whatever they wanted.  I'd like to add that the boys didn't even have to wear dress clothes, like some private schools require - they were wearing jeans, corduroy pants, and a couple even had on the cool football jersey t-shirts, and all the while the girls had to wear the plaid jumpers with white blouses.  I thought about this last night, and decided that maybe they had an abundance of blue and white plaid jumpers in the NBC wardrobe department, so that's what they had the little girl actresses wear. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of the private church school we attended, Puddin'.  We girls had to wear dresses or skirts and they couldn't be more than an inch above our knee.  My parents spent a fortune keeping me in nice, appropriate school clothes and then having to buy "regular" clothes for the rest of the time. The boys got to wear jeans and cords.  That always pissed me off.