Reflecting on my father's contempt for women
I've been reflecting lately on my childhood influences and how it effected my life and who I am today. My father (now 92) had always expressed contempt for women. One of my earliest memories of this was of him expressing disgust toward the women who served as volunteers in the military during WWII. As a young child I just absorbed it and believed that they were terrible people. It wasn't until yesterday that I thought "WTF was that about?" He would have been 12 when the war ended. It seems very unlikely that he would have had any interactions with a female volunteer, or any personal reason, at age 12, to hate them. I'm guessing his opinions were formed from listening to his own father and/or older brother. I did a quick search on the history of women in the military during WWII and discovered that there was a very active hate campaign against women serving. Male soldiers warned their sisters that volunteering would ruin their lives and reputations, that female volunteers were actually just prostitutes or lesbians. This Wikipedia article includes a section on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps
This was a long time ago, but interesting in how that effort to spread contempt rippled across generations. Also interesting is his continuing contempt for women and how he got there by absorbing opinions expressed, presumably, by older boys and men who read gossip and propaganda, and never stopped to think about it over the next 80 years. Does anyone else have similar memories?