Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact Number 25(a)—Naughty postcards.

In the boxes of postcards that we found in my parents’ closet, there were a fair number that modern sensitivities find problematic. They are fossils, imprints of attitudes that, like dinosaurs, once ruled the earth but are now (thankfully) endangered. They were sent by members of my dad’s lab, away at meetings or on vacation, to the drudges who were stuck behind their benches, mostly in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. From the messages, it seems like it was expected, close to an obligation, to send a racy card back to the group, whether from Tahiti or Belgium or Bangalore. 

In fifty years, a lot has changed in academia. I remember very few women in my dad’s group from that time—there was a lab assistant who was there for most of his research career, a professor who was associated with his group, a visiting postdoc and a handful of grad students. I don’t think my dad felt any need to fight against the mores of academia on their account at that time, he probably just took it for granted. Fifty years later, recent cohorts of grad students in the biological sciences have been majority female. Workplace standards of what is acceptable have changed. Complain about “woke” all you want, those changes are uncomplicatedly, unreservedly good. I look at these cards and what is written on them and I have to wonder what I would have felt, were I a 22 year old woman with a serious interest in insulin receptors, looking at those cards taped to the break room ‘fridge. 

I’m not going to condemn my dad as a sexist pig, nor am I going to excuse him as “a man of his time.” I think, if anything, I’ll chide him (or, rather, him as he was in the 1970’s) as perhaps not as thoughtful of the “other” as he could be—not actively bad, he was busy and just couldn’t be bothered to do the extra work to resist being bad or change habits or go against the flow. Honestly, I don’t need these postcards to remind me of several other instances of this lack of deeper thought from him, a laugh at the expense of someone not in the main stream. But these cards are useful to remind me that sometimes doing good—or even more trivially, failing to do bad—just takes a tiny modicum of thinking about others from their point of view, and really doesn’t cost me that much, so I should do it more often.

(There is one of these many cards I’ll single out, a slab of beefcake amidst the cheesecake—to the lab, from Sarah J., who wrote from Honolulu in 1983, “I was looking for a dirty card when THIS “Island Beauty” caught my eye!” I don’t remember Sarah, but I’d like to tell her I’m kind of sorry for my dad’s shortcomings, and I hope you stuck with it. Here’s to you, Sarah, and hopefully we can keep making progress.)