Birdcage Poem By Marilyn Frye

Marilyn Frye draws from her own personal experience as a feminist activist in the 1970s and 80s to writer her account of oppression . I believe that the historical context of this is key to appreciating Frye’s work as well as understanding the cause that she was specifically fighting for and the general movement she was part of. She using the metaphor of the birdcage to try to explain oppression. You are to imagine the oppressed group being stuck inside a birdcage, they cannot escape not due to any individual wire that makes up the cage but due to how they all work together to keep the group in it. It is all the binds of the cage that keep the oppressed group in . The birdcage structure is also meant to identify how hard it can be to identify

The main idea here is that it can be easy to just look at one problem that say women face as an isolated issue instead of taking a step back and looking and how it is inherently interconnecting with many other issues that women face, thus making it classifiable as oppression. With Frye wanted to clarify what it truly means to be oppressed in order to show how important the issue is and how it must be tackled. Se states herself that the meaning of her argument was not simply to show which groups were oppressed, but to show the real-life implications of oppression thus showing why it is so important for this term to be clearly defined . This means that simply suffering or being miserable is not a sufficient reason to say that a person or group are oppressed, they have t to meet certain specific characteristics. The example I am going to be apply this account to t-is that of the gender divide in health care. To note in this example I will be referring to men and women to mean those assigned male at birth and those assigned female at

In her account of oppression there is no simple way out of the cage, it seems like all the odds are stacked against the oppressed person or group. It is also a hard thing to notice, such as the birdcage metaphor shows. There is obviously no legal justification for women receiving inferior medical treatment to men but this does not mean that it does not seem to happen. According to a 2021 study discussed in the house of lords, there is a definite visible gender gap in regards to medical attention received . It was found that women are far less likely to be taken seriously by doctors, less likely to be monitored correctly and less likely to receive pain medication after surgery. All in all it seem like women are just taken less seriously in the medical field. This doesn’t even take into account the evidence that medical conditions that only affect women seem to be undiagnosed and just generally not taken as seriously as conditions that affect both genders or simply just men . Due to the massive disparity in treatment, we can conclude that this is based on gender thus it fitting into Frye’s definition of