God Bless Mrs. Postma

I remember exactly when I became a feminist. OK, maybe not exactly. I don't have the exact date, but take it from a professional historian, exact dates rarely matter. I do know the year: 1965. Back in the Glory Days of kindergarten, long before assessment targets and standardized tests and curriculum reviews. Mostly we played. Yes, we learned to count to 50 and to sing the alphabet song. We planted seeds in cups and collected pussy willows. We made Mother's Day cards and pressed our hands into plaster-of-Paris and glued macaroni onto soup cans and and tried to jump-rope (DeeDee was the best, but that was because she had gone to nursery school, which was a totally unfair advantage). We ate our mother's cookies and drank whole-fat milk from little glass bottles and took naps on rectangular rag rugs. But mostly we played.

It was a glorious place to play. The second floor of the Western Springs Christian Reformed Church housed our kindergarten. On Sunday it served as the home of the Sunday School but on weekdays, it was ours: a large central room for our circle discussions and our singing and our nap times, and six small rooms, three on each side, that opened onto the central room. These small rooms could be closed off with sliding panels--which is what happened on Sundays--but during kindergarten, they remained open to the central hall, under the keen eyes of our teacher, Mrs. Postma. In each of the small rooms was a different play area: Room 1 was set up as a play school room, Room 2 as a play kitchen, 3 contained the large pressboard building blocks, 4 held many sets of Lincoln Logs, 5 housed a racetrack and cars, and 6, ah, in Room 6 stood a fantastic Wild West fort, complete with soldiers and horses and stagecoaches and attacking Indians.

Already at age 5 I knew that the best place in which to spend my time was the Past. And I wanted, desperately wanted, to play with that fort. But our little play rooms were sex-segregated, or as we say in academia these days, "gendered." At play time, the boys played in Rooms 4 thru 6, girls played in Rooms 1 and 2. Room 3 was a bit more ambiguous. Some of the rougher girls played in Room 3. I was not a rough girl. But I longed for that fort. Cowboys and Indians. The Wild West. All the romance and glamor of the Past.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of pining, one memorable day in 1965 in a quiet suburb of Chicago, at kindergarten play time, I girded my loins (so to speak) and entered Room 6.

Oh my.

The boys first jeered and then, when I would not leave, pelted me with plastic Indians and frontiersmen, while the other girls cheered them on. And Mrs. Postma? She marched over, grabbed my arm, and informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I belonged in Room 2. Geez. Not even Room 1.

I looked up at her, and I saw Power. And Injustice. And just plain Stupidity. I trudged over to Room 1. I cried. I sulked. And I became angry. Very Angry.

God bless Mrs. Postma.