{This is in response to a prompt from Friday Fictioneers. With all the festivities of the season, I am getting to this rather late and I’m afraid this is another one of my severely mutilated 300-word tales, shrunk to 100 through brutal and not terrribly convincing plastic surgery. To see the original, see this link. Thanks for the prompt and for reading!}
Skin, itchy, from my white smocked sundress, I abandoned the picnic.
The nearby cliffs were etched with a reflection of my torment.
I stretched my legs on soft grass. Socks, clumped. Mary-Janes, at ten and two.
Quite unladylike.
Leaning back, elbows locked, I gazed, until the white-hot, hazy blur yielded shadowy men and women. Working busily. Side by side.
I tugged the smocking irritating my flat chest like sandpaper.
Maddening!
“Don’t spill. Knees together. Sit up straight.”
Boys did as they pleased.
“Nothin’s uglier, than a woman’s locked knees.”
I trembled at the fiendish tickle of an insult in my ear.
Thought provoking story.
Thanks Dawn.
The ‘locked knees’ was definitely something to ponder. Well done.
That means alot coming from you Sandra. Thank you.
Story of every girl…the training starts as early as one!
Perhaps our children will find the shackles of gender less cumbersome.
It is good that we are getting a little less strict with those gender roles than the time period you were thinking about, but we still have a long way to go.
Yes thats true. All our binary operations are splitting into infinite sequences.
This has not suffered at all from your “chopping”!
And yeah… they say it’s better now, but really? There are still standards…
Better..it is by definition a relative term. ?
😀
Dear Andrea,
Kids can be so cruel. They seem to come by in naturally. Well done.
Shalom,
Rochelle
Thanks. Some behaviors are innate, not learned, I think. Society merely supplies the ammunition, but the desire to harm others is already there.
Alas we are put into those roles way too early…
I remember that boys had to be tough or they would be kicked into pulp…. because other boys did as they pleased.
Yes, i think my main characters point of view is rather one-sided. In one earlier, mercilessly-cut edition of this story, she at least concedes, that those ties on men looked a little tight!
Here’s my more ample original story which is somewhat less damning of the male sex:
https://frlcnews.com/2019/01/03/locked-up-miragelong-version/
Double standards all over the place. Great imagery.
Yes, not so long ago, the difference in expectations was glaring. The original story, linked in the intro, describes this in more detail. Thanks Stu!
I guess i will take that as a compliment, in that the words had the effect intended.
Too many women and girls are still judged on their looks. An interesting reminder how much worse it was in the past, that knocked knees phrase makes me grind my teeth. I like how you set the mood: a brief moment of freedom but not happy at all.
That comment about a woman’s locked knees held menacing undertones that left me tense.
Yes, especially since one can lock ones knees either by straightening the joints completely, so there is no bend in them, or by holding them together tightly while sitting.
I can only imagine trying to explain this to my daughter and being completely ignored – and rightly so!
Haha!
Very ‘period’ in its societal norms. Poor girl. If she could have just waited a decade or two to be born…..
Without such sufferers in our midst, how could we measure how far we’ve come?
The men and women get to work side by side but the poor girls have very different rules from the boys.
The men and women in her vision could well be the boys and girls she sees around her at the picnic. This story is set in the late 1960s, early 70s, when everyone was more restricted by gender.
Society has different rules for different sex. It is unfair in someway.
It can be especially baffling for children, who seem to have an innate sense of fairness as equal treatment. Also this story is set in an earlier time, the ’60s or ’70s in the US, when gender roles were much more strictly adhered to and enforced than they are now, and the character, though she sees a vision of something like equality, has yet to experience it, in her own life.
It starts so early, the training for gender roles
Very true, Neil.