Introduction

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E-mail your real-life stories/recollections/anecdotes to me at: girlinthelockerroom@yahoo.com

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It will be some small point: she thinks Princeton and Yale always had female students; that abortion was legal when you were a teenager; that you could wear blue jeans to school. She assumes you could travel when you were her age; that you could pursue any career; that you could have sex with whomever you pleased, that you could even have sex ….. that all the little freedoms and responsibilities of 21^st century female life were always like that.

And because she and her friends don’t know the reality of a few short years back, they don’t recognize the threats to our integrity in the current political climate.

We have to tell them. We have to tell them now.

Tell your best tales. Many will be funny, because life in retrospect tends to be that way or, at the least, ironic or tragi-comic. I want the small daily details about life back then for women and girls. Not the bra-burning protests, but the time you said no to a habit or an expectation and acted in an original way. Tell her how it was; the little ways in which girls’ ambitions and expressions were circumscribed, discouraged or ignored and then how you found your way to them anyway.

My own tale is Girl in the Locker Room! For a short time, in the 1970s, I was a sports reporter for The New York Times, and my daily life took on a strange, sometimes comic, symbolism for the era.

I want the men to also write their stories, how the rules about women were rules that affected them too.

And we want to hear from the current generation, to whom this blog is dedicated.  Send in your contemporary stories and questions.

I will sort, edit and post your tales. Don’t write the story of your life; just one or two of your top anecdotes. Keep it short. Less is more. I won’t accept anonymous stories, but I’ll withhold your name online if you prefer.

E-mail me at: girlinthelockerroom@yahoo.com