Help! I'm being held prisoner in blue dotted Swiss!
Once upon a time there was a nice little girl who liked to wear overalls and cowboy shirts and play "Superman" with her brothers. Her Grandmother said, "Nice little girls don't play rough.” And because she loved her Grandmother and wanted to please her, the nice little girl tried to stop climbing trees and playing ball and getting dirty. It wasn't easy.
When she was in second grade, her father bought her a green and white bike. She loved her bike but when she rode it to school on Monday, the big kids laughed at her: "That's a boys' bike. Girls don't ride boys' bikes." She still loved her bike after that, but she loved it better when there was no one else around. As she got older, it seemed as though all the neat stuff was reserved for boys:
"Nice little girls don't spit, it's dirty."
"Nice little girls don't scratch, it's unladylike.”
"Nice little girls shouldn't talk so loudly; it makes
them sound like hoodlums."
"Nice little girls don't wrestle."
She never heard anyone tell little boys that they shouldn't run, spit, scratch, or wrestle.
In high school she didn't get her driver's license because her brothers always had the car anyway and her father said, "You can always get a ride with someone else."
Her guidance counselor told her she might want to teach until she got married, but being a successful reporter as she wanted to do would be pretty hard for a girl.
Her father said she'd probably never get married because she was too bull-headed for a female.
She had a lot of stomach-aches in high school.
When she did get married (despite her father's prediction), her husband said things like:
“I work hard all day and expect to come home to a clean house and a
hot supper and an agreeable wife.”
"My wife doesn't need to work--I make enough money to support you. Why
don't you join a women's club or something?”
"What my wife does reflects on me. If you don't stop
all that peace crap, I'll never
get promoted."
The nice little girl, who was now a nice little wife, usually didn't bother to argue. It's difficult to argue with a stomach-ache anyway.
So she kept her mouth shut, but her eyes and ears were open, and she saw that nice little girls could do anything that little boys could do--sometimes a lot better too. She heard that females had as much right to be people as males and that nice little wives didn't have to be combination doormats/mirrors for their husbands’ egos.
She listened and she thought, and one day she decided to stop being what everyone told her she should be and to start being herself.
Nowadays when anyone says, "Nice women don't (or shouldn’t, or can’t)", the nice little girl who used to be a nice little wife and is now a grown-up woman who never has stomach-aches, replies,
“THE HELL THEY CAN’T!”