Feminist scholar Audre Lorde has thoroughly documented this phenomenon, having been on the receiving end of white feminist scapegoating more than once. In her speech "The Uses of Anger," which she delivered at a 1981 National Women's Studies Association Conference, Lorde recounts the the times she's been dismissed as "angry" for bringing critiques of racism into predominantly white feminist spaces.
In the novel, Warriors Don't Cry, the author, Melba Pattillo, describes what her reactions and feelings are to the racial hatred and discrimination around her, within this book she and eight other African-American teenagers receive in Little Rock Arkansas during the Civil Rights movement in 1957. These nine students became the first color people to integrate an all-white public school hoping that in the future, people of color that live in the same area could go to the same school because they will have the right to the quality education that white families have. The degradation of the Little Rock ' Central High wasn't predicted easy and throughout the school year, Melba goes through abuse, catcalls, and suffering. Throughout this book, it has revealed that
She is mean. She shows that she is mean by threatening the lives of the girls if they say anything about witchcraft. “Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you” (act 1 line 460) She also shows that she is mean when she is coping Mary making the pastors in the court believe that Mary is a witch. “
While men have always featured prominently throughout history, women tend to be more of an afterthought, and especially in fiction, women tend to fall into strict archetypes that allow very little deviation. This holds true in Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass, but many of the female characters also exhibit great agency and power that women in other Roman stories tended not to have. There is a wide range of female archetypes in this book but they are also deep and complex characters that should not be pigeon-holed into one category. One of the first complex female characters that Lucius, the main character, meets in The Golden Ass is the servant girl Photis. While Lucius is staying with his friend Milo, Lucius’ aunt Byrrhena warns him of Milo’s wife, Pamphile, who practices witchcraft, she tells him instead to turn his attention to Photis, saying on page 22, “So even though it has its hazards, Photis must be your target (Apuleius).”
Eula Biss reasons that people need to act collectively in order to truly inoculate themselves from their fears. “If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love.” , she says as she realizes that people are delineating the good from the bad of vaccinations. Connections between these two are inevitable, and it is when people register them do they begin to act collectively. One example, in Voltaire’s Candide, he exposes the mistreatment of women through satire in his setting of hypocritical optimism of their France during the Age of Enlightenment.
In Arthur Miller's’ The Crucible, jealousy and mistrust are the most dominant emotions Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Proctor shares for one another. Their jealousy and mistrust are rooted in their desire for John Proctor's love, which inevitably leads to the compromise of their Puritan morals of their society. At the beginning of the play, Betty Parris confirms Abigail Williams true motivation to kill Elizabeth Proctor. “You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife! You drank a charm to kill Goody Proctor” (Miller 19).
She needs to have a name that would separate her from the society and show she is different. Knowing she is flowing with life, he names her The Golden One. Brothers in the society are not supposed to interact with sisters, but both The Golden One and Equality do. They commit many transgressions and Equality starts to develop feelings for The Golden One. When the two finally speak Equality tells her that he 's bestowed her with the name The Golden One, and she admits she has been calling him The Unconquered.
In Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns , Nana tells Mariam that a man always finds a way to blame a woman. This mistreatment of women is depicted in the novel by utilizing multiple examples. Throughout the novel, men were able to use women as scapegoats in the Afghani society that deemed women as unequal to men.
Essentially, marriage in the 1700’s was seen merely as a means of birthing heirs and finding a way to financially support yourself, so it resulted in both men and women being devalued. It is universally known that women were often treated as inept and helpless rather than sophisticated people with autonomy and capabilities. In fact, during this time, “married women were consistently compared with minor children and the insane-- both categories of people considered incapable of caring for themselves. To marry a woman was, in one sense, to ‘adopt’ her-- or at least to adopt responsibility for all the circumstances of life with which she entered the marriage” (Teachman 39). Furthermore, when women got married, they would legally cease to exist.
The Woman Warrior is a “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts” in which Maxine Hong Kingston recounts her experiences as a second generation immigrant. She tells the story of her childhood by intertwining Chinese talk-story and personal experience, filling in the gaps in her memory with assumptions. The Woman Warrior dismantles the archetype of the typical mother-daughter relationship by suggesting that diaspora redefines archetypes by combining conflicting societal norms. A mother’s typical role in a mother-daughter relationship is one of guidance and leadership. Parents are responsible for teaching a child right from wrong and good from evil.
Once her family moves to Toronto after the war to settle down, she was approximately eight years old. At that time, circumstances changes for Elaine who feels unhappy, helpless and yearns for female friends as she has no female friends yet (Vijay Singh Mehta 179). As Pavla Chudějová (34) has suggested in “Exploring the women’s experience”, Elaine become conscious of the society’s gender restrictions for the first time when she starts going to school. At school, Elaine follows the rules where she has to wear skirts to school and “the girls hold hands; the boys don’t” (CE 50-51), as well as to enter the building through the “grandiose entranceways with carvings around them and ornate insets above the doors, inscribed in curvy, solemn lettering: GIRLS and BOYS.” (CE 51) which confuses her and
A wonderful mother, Adele also tends to her husband’s every need. Furthermore, she seems to enjoy this role, apparently thriving in it. Her friend Edna starts off like Adele but then realizes the role is drowning her. Edna and Adele are different people who, though dealt the same cards in life,
In the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh, there is a lot of feminist traits and gender criticism present. The female characters except for Ninsun are looked at to be vile and seductive beings. Shamhat and Ishtar, the goddess of love and fertility, were two characters that was overlooked and decided to be considered bad people based on actions they took. Shamhat is a prostitute that seduced Enkidu and became the reason he strayed away from his animal state. “There he is, Shamhat, open your embrace” (The Epic of Gilgamesh 42)
In the essay “The No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston, the story of living in a traditionally male-dominated Chinese society with a very dysfunctional family structure is told. The villages would look upon the men as useful, and women as useless to their society. Kingston, the main character, learns this first hand from how her aunt was treated. Kingston’s aunt, The No Name Woman, is victimized by a male-dominated society by being shunned for an illegitimate child. As a woman, the odds were automatically against you in their society.
The Evil Queen This is my story. Everyone just assumes that I tried to kill Snow White because of envy and jealous well I was both of there but the not why I tried to kill her. I never really wanted to hurt anyone, that was never my intention until she made it so difficult