Beginning Gender Lens Project

The Easy Bake Oven was one of my favorite toys as a child and I thought it would be interesting to choose a topic that I had fond memories of. There is a wealth of information on the timeline of this toy, but very little, if any, studies that I have found. Most of the articles are either nostalgic or about safety recalls. Hopefully I can find some research on the social or cultural effects of this product.

The most surprising and impressive bit of information I have found so far is that a 13 year old girl started a petition to have gender neutral colors for the Easy Bake Oven. Her younger brother wanted one, but did not want a purple and pink toy. Hasbro, makers of the oven, complied. The petition garnered over 40,000 signatures and included professional chefs. Now the line includes a black model suitable for any gender that wishes to play.

Uploading Images Recap

Before this week, I had already uploaded some images to my project and was not sure how to properly cite them so I just linked them to the website where I found them. Fortunately this week explained exactly what was needed in order to post pictures. I did end up changing a couple of my pictures due to not being able to find copyright information, but I am happy with how it turned out. Using images give the project much more visual appeal and make the pages more interesting.

After looking at the gender lens project and discussion topic for next week, I am pretty excited. I get so frustrated seeing the way products, especially toys are gendered. When I was a child I did play with LEGO’s. I have two older brothers and they had huge tubs of them. My LEGO’s came in a pink bucket and were pink, purple, light blue, and white. I had one large flat piece and it was a beach. I do not remember what the people looked like, but I do know they were the same shape and size as my brothers’ but they were probably female. I just wanted to play with my brothers, but they would have nothing to do with girl LEGO’s so I either played with my LEGO’s near them, or they would let me play with pieces they did not want to play with out of their tub.

Cultural Research Trials and Tribulations

After finally completing my project I can breathe a sigh of relief. I initially had some trouble finding statistical information for Austria in the late 19th to early 20th century, but I think I managed to find some useful information. Finding the exact methods for splitting an atom also proved to be a challenge. I do not understand physics nor have I ever taken a physics class so it was interesting learning about the discovery of nuclear fission and all of the people involved. There were a surprising number of women doing research on this subject, but it was Lise Meitner who was able to put all of the pieces together.

Formatting my project on this blog was not easy. First I could not figure out how to do a block quote but thankfully I discovered the “blockquote” button. It is very convenient. Next I did not know how to format the text into subheadings. After looking for quite some time, I stumbled onto the “toolbar toggle” button which revealed the Paragraph drop menu. The last issue I had was indenting the references in my bibliography. I believe the hyperlinks are not allowing me to indent.

I really enjoyed learning something new about history, technology, women, and blog formatting.