Luann Againn by Greg Evans for April 19, 2021

For those wondering, this was published in 1993.

Guys don’t make passes

At girls who smell like diesel fumes….

If boys did those jobs, they’d be considered gay!

They’re less lucrative, more solitary.

Is this the beginning of Miss Phelps’ random nameplates? (“Questions?” “Don’t Ask Me”)

Destroy the barriers, Luann!

In high school, I scored high in mechanical aptitude, but back then, girls didn’t go to engineering school. The bad old days…

It is stunning to realize how “not so very long ago” these kinds of limitations were just taken for granted … at least by most people. Thank goodness for those who dared to challenge and overcome!

LOVE THIS!

This was a number of years before Lisa on “Ice Road Truckers”

The driving has gotten easier, but some drivers have to load and unload their trucks.

I tried to fight my school to take shop class instead of home ec since I could already sew and cook, but no dice. I was really upset, but my mom might have told them to not let me take shop. My child was in a class that covered both, but neither very well. The skills they learned were minimal. But at least equally useless.

In Sydney in Aust. a builder hired a female labourer, long story, worked well until his wife found out. she was instantly dismissed. He also reckoned she was the best worker he ever had.

Phelps should have taken those refresher courses for counsellors… :D

A lot of what made those “Girl’s Occupations” was that they were generally poorly paid. For anybody who remembers when the Help Wanted sections were divided into Male and Female divisions the salaries plummeted on the Female side. (Heck, I remember doing a temp proofreading job where the guy doing the exact same thing I was got paid more for it. Of course we weren’t allowed to complain about that.)

My mom drove trucks in the army when she served during WWII. She drove buses as a civilian and when my home town put in a city bus service, she was the first female bus driver they hired. She made the paper once when the brakes went out on her bus at the top of a steep hill and she managed to get to a safe place on the highway at the bottom, where the bus coasted to a stop.

Computer programmer, architect, movie director, scientist etc…

Back in ‘junior high’ (no ‘middle school’) girls took home ec; boys, ‘mechanical drawing’. Mech drawing:first step in math-sc curriculum. My friend ( later became a civil engineer) was a math wiz but forbidden to take mech drawing.

I tried to add this to my comments earlier but it wouldn’t save. In those days, newspaper job ads were ‘men wanted’ and ‘women wanted’. Jobs for men were where the engineer ads were posted. Jobs for women were cleaning ladies, nurses and nursing aides, secretaries and teachers.

The trick is to ask the right question.