uispeccoll:Excerpt from Erin Rollenhagen’s Tumblr post: When I was in middle school, there was a boy
uispeccoll:Excerpt from Erin Rollenhagen’s Tumblr post: When I was in middle school, there was a boy in my class who wore Hooters shirts every day. It drove my friend Sarah and I crazy. Looking back I’d say the shirts themselves weren’t the issue, it was his comments and disrespectful attitude more than anything that got our backs up. Anyway, after he told one of our female classmates she was “just a boy with a penis wrapped around and stuck up her butt” (I still don’t get it but I know it’s rude) we got fed up and decided to create a parody shirt. I remember going home and telling my parents about it and instead of talking me out of raising a stink, they immediately got behind us. It took my dad about 10 minutes to set up a drafting board with some yellow flimsy and start gleefully calling out double entendres. Once we’d settled on an animal, he even helped me get the shape of the rooster’s wattles right to suggest the appropriate male anatomy. Now that’s support. Even when we were threatened with suspension from school for wearing our shirts, the support from home didn’t waver. I was 14 and ready to take on the world.Today for Women’s History Wednesday, we’re reblogging from the Tumblr of Erin Rollenhagen, who donated this t-shirt to the Iowa Women’s Archives back in 1994. The shirt attracted attention from more than just her middle school administration; soon she was giving interviews to local and national press, writing an essay on the controversy for Seventeen magazine, participating in a forum on sexism and free speech alongside the director of the ACLU, and sharing an Iowa Woman of the Year award with her classmate Sarah Hegland. Taking on the world, indeed.The Erin Rollenhagen papers are available for use in the Iowa Women’s Archives: http://collguides.lib.uiowa.edu/?IWA0209 -- source link
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