Onslow's car backfiring.

[Seymour Upperthong]

No guy would have been caught dead taking Home Ec when I was in school. He'd have never lived it down..

I'm with Bora Natty. We had Home Economics in Worcester Massachusetts, where you would have needed pretty big ones to defend attendance in that class. I entered Burncoat Junior High School the year they invented the miniskirt. By second semester, the seventh grade girls had invented the microskirt in sewing class, well before that phenomenon made national news. To attend that class might have been worth it . Home Ec, NO!

Worcester was a blue collar mill town, reputed to be one of the leading industrial cities in the US. So the boys were shoveled into the shop classes to see where they might fit into the local workforce. With the benefit of hindsight, I thought it was pretty sad that such a culture existed that would condone initiation into a lifestyle before the plebs even achieved puberty.

 

[Marianna]

I attended junior high and high school in a manufacturing town, and the assumption was that all of the boys would end up in the factory on the production line. When I graduated in 1962, the work options for girls were secretarial, nursing, and teaching, to keep body and soul together until we married. My interests and abilities pointed me toward architecture, but that was soon quashed. I worked most of my adult life as a librarian.