Brigid LA-1-R

THE WAY IT WAS

HISTORY

There always has to be a clash between what is expected from a child and what he or she often feels like doing naturally. Women's lib has demonstrated that expectations of what a girl may turn out to be has a limiting effect on the roles she will seek for herself. They forget how limiting a little boy's upbringing can also be, but it's certain that left in a neutral corner he would not grow according to stereotype. What are the possibilities of letting children grow up without bias? What if the boy can choose pink instead of blue, panties instead of shorts, a dress instead of jeans or choose from an assortment of clothes as he likes? We'll never know because it's not just a matter of bias. Boys and girls are different in physical appearance, and though many articles of feminine clothing are more comfortable as well as more pretty than male attire there are some advantages in some articles of male clothing. It seems that in the recent past women have been free to pick and choose in the menswear department while men have not had the same freedom in the women's department. Most men will readily admit that women didn't just leave men's clothes as they found them, but adapted them and enhanced their comfort and made them prettier. The range of color in slacks, designs in shirts and variety of underpants testifies to all this. Men are no longer condemned to wear dull and rough material. They have come along way, Buck. And I hope the revolution keeps going on. Still not many men appear in Caftans which is probably the single most happy development of unisex.

Be all that as it may, when I was born in 1929, there was a grain of rationality in children's upbringing that is lacking now. In those days, in Europe at least, it didn't seem necessary to separate the girls from

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