The high wages and shortage of labor brought into the labor
market many persons who would not have been in it in peacetime,
such as old persons, youths, clergy, and, above all, women.
This flow of women from homes into factories or other services
had the most profound effects on social life and modes of living,
revolutionizing the relations of the sexes, bringing women up to a
level of social, legal, and political equality closer than
previously to that of men, obtaining for them the right to vote in
some countries, the right to own or dispose of property in other
more backward ones, changing the appearance and costume of women by
such innovations as shorter skirts, shorter hair, less frills, and
generally a drastic reduction in the amount of clothing they
wore...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/05.html#14
The shift from home to school in the early grades was adjusted
to by girls more easily than by boys, partly because girls were
more self-assured and gregarious. By the age of ten or twelve,
girls were developed physically, neurologically, emotionally, and
socially about two years in advance of boys.
All this tended to make boys less self-assured, indecisive,
weak, and dependent. The steady increase in the percentage of women
teachers in the lower grades worked in the same direction, since
women teachers favored girls and praised those attitudes and
techniques that were more natural to girls. New methods, such as
the whole-word method of teaching reading or the use of
true-and-false or multiple-choice examinations, were also better
adapted to female than to masculine talents.
Less and less emphasis was placed on critical judgment, while
more and more was placed on intuitive or subjective decisions. In
this environment girls did better, and boys felt inferior or
decided that school was a place for girls and not for boys. The
growing aggressiveness of girls pushed these hesitant boys aside
and intensified the problem. As consequences of this, boys had
twice as many "non-readers" as girls, several times as many
stutterers, and many times as many teen-age bed-wetters.
While the outside world was
decreasing its differential treatment of children on a sexual basis
by treating boys and girls more and more alike (and that treatment
was better adapted to girls than to boys) within the middle-class
home, the growing emotional frustrations of the mother were leading
to an increasing distinction on a sexual basis in her emotional
treatment of her children.
The earliest feeling of sensual
reassurance and comfort any child experiences is against the body
of its mother. To a boy baby this is a heterosexual relationship,
while to the girl it is a relationship with the same sex. In most
cases the little girl avoids any undesirable persistence of this
homosexual tendency by shifting her admiration and attention to
some available male, usually her father.
Thus by the age of six or eight, a daughter has become "Daddy's
girl," awaiting his return from work to communicate the news of the
day, getting his slippers and newspaper, and hoping that he will
read her a story or share her viewing of a favorite television
program before she must go to bed. By the age of twelve, in a
normal girl, this interest in male creatures has begun to shift to
some boy in her class at school. With a boy baby the transference
is later and less gradual.
The undesirable aspects of his love for his mother are avoided
by the powerful social pressures of the incest taboo, but this
merely means that the sexual element in his concern for the
opposite sex is suppressed and is undeveloped. Thus there is a
natural, we might almost say biological, tendency in our society
for the sexual development of the boy to be delayed and for the
girl to be free from this retarding influence...
ne result of this is that the much greater (sometimes
indefinitely postponed) delay for a boy of emotional readiness
after sexual awareness leaves the boy emotionally desexed for so
long that it affects his sexuality and emotional maturity adversely
and to an increasingly advanced age. But the opposite is true for a
girl, because of the shorter and decreasing lag of her emotional
readiness after her sexual awareness.
Lolita, who is not as rare as the readers of that novel wanted
to imagine, becomes increasingly frequent, and cannot be satisfied
by boys of her own age; consequently she seeks for many reasons,
including financial resources and greater emotional maturity, her
sex companions among older men...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#75
So, can a girl take the initiative to let a guy know she
like him?
