She understands that women feel weak and are bullied by men, so she targets the female audience’s delicate emotions toward male oppression to enhance her argument for gender equality. In her introduction, the author employs pathos to engage women’s feelings into her argument, and she uses these emotions to call for women to gain ambition and strength to fight for civil rights. Wollstonecraft tells women that “men endeavor to sink us lower, merely rendering us as alluring objects for a moment” (307). She claims men treat women as “alluring objects,” which expresses her point that men treat women as inferior creatures (307). Also, she directly relates to the female audience when she uses the first person pronoun “us” (307), for she “acknowledges that she too is a victim of oppression” (Smith 559).
In nearly all historical societies, sexism was prevalent. Power struggles between genders mostly ended in men being the dominant force in society, leaving women on a lower rung of the social ladder. However, this does not always mean that women have a harder existence in society. Scott Russell Sanders faces a moral dilemma in “The Men We Carry in Our Minds.” In the beginning, Sanders feels that women have a harder time in society today than men do.
In the short essay, “About Men” by Gretel Ehrlich she uses personal anecdotes of her experience in Wyoming to divulge into the intricacies of men’s emotions, and how they endure and elucidates the erroneous stereotypes formulated by society. She divulges into the contemporary status of Wyoming cowboys, and men in general; how they are just as ‘fragile’ as a women while cloistered geographically and emotionally. Gretel Ehrlich begins with the establishment of the contemporary status of the cowboy figure. They are described as the “Strong silent type”, Theodore Roosevelt-like, “riding into the sunset” with his rough riders, after a long day at work as a “macho, trigger-happy” man. Ehrlich establishes this spurious concept of Wyoming cowboys
Both ‘Vox’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ have shown how the female voice is reduced to merely an object for men similarly, as both females in each narrative are put to work in certain roles for the sake of men. Both narratives show the female voice in their different contexts of time and situations, showing
After skimming through Volume 1 of The Norton Anthology Literature by Women, I noticed the reoccurring themes of patriarchy, women subordination, and the strength to be creative despite oppression. During the times that these literary pieces were written, women were constantly battling the patriarchy in order to get basic rights. During the earlier time periods, intelligence was seen as a sign of an evil spirit in a woman, resulting in miniscule amounts of literary works written by women. Women were not provided with equal spaces to creatively express themselves, as mentioned by Virginia Woolf. Moreover, they were not given the same publishing opportunities, many women either went anonymous or by a fake male name to have their works published.
Female oppression can be just as subtle as hypermasculinity with its words. Holden Caulfield narrates, “Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them” (Salinger 66). Literature expresses the way of which women are discriminated against and at times it is satirical, but this sector of hypermasculinity is rarely checked by narrators and authors of works. It is almost a cultural norm and expected of novels with male perspective characters to convey their attitudes and personalities in this manner. A conductor of a study of hypermasculinity explains, “Cultural socialization processes
Society persists in restraining what someone can be, when they can be it, how they can be it, and where they can be it, a precedent set to continue throughout generations. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, men hold control over women to perpetuate the existence of gender roles that are stipulated in women their whole lives. Womanhood is viewed as a service to men rather than an experience of life with women being equated to the men in their lives. Women are always perceived through the lens of how society believes they should be. Throughout Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the progression of an individual’s womanhood is on a pedestal in front of everybody for the sake of belittling and impeding women’s lives without
During this week, we have covered numerous topics, none more prominent than the oppression of women. Everyone had different opinions, allowing me to take into account different views on the issue. In one of the texts we examined, “Oppression”, Marilyn Frye, a philosopher, debates the subjugation of women. She states the cultural customs that causes oppression of women. I do agree with her view that women are oppressed, but I do not agree that it is just women.
When analyzing the characters of the Handmaid's Tale and the Scarlet Letter through the feminist lense, sexism has become so internalized that women work to maintain the system through prejudice and belittling one another for not fulfilling orthodox gender roles.
Virginia Woolf asserts her feminist thought on why there have been so few female writers. Tying being a minority to the very few numbers of men writers to women writers. Through a series of examples and claims she makes to help understand how difficult this time period was for any person who was not a male. During the 1920s the 19th Amendment granted women the rights to vote, we being to see the League of Women Voters educating women about their right and to exercise because this was something very abnormal. Congress tries to makes statements like “Men and women shall have equal rights”.
This theme relates to the real world because gender inequality is a problem that has been faced throughout history. In many cultures in the past, women were in-charge of domestic work while men took the roles of public life. Be that as it may, both men and women took equally important roles; however, because of the longstanding gender bias in the world, the roles of men in society were glorified more than the roles of women. Today, gender inequality still exists in the world. Specifically, today’s women are faced with sexist comments and attitudes from men that put women down.
The essay, “What I’ve Learned from Men”, by Barbara Ehrenreich is an impressive piece of writing focusing on a significant theme which is still present and is witnessed to this day. The theme that the author discusses is the on-going gender issues shedding light on the differences between men and women. Throughout the essay, Ehrenreich argues about the one thing women need to learn from men: how to be tough. She support this argument by providing a personal experience, taking her back to the time when she didn’t acknowledge the quality of being tough and falling victim to sexual harassment. She then explains this act as “behaving like a lady” and continues to support her claim by stating facts describing how women tend to act nice or “as a lady” by being the ones responsible to keep the conversation with a man going and constantly smiling even when unneeded and even when expressing anger and displeasure.
Woolf and other artists are able to use the censorship and hardships that they encountered in order to gain motivation which is reflected in Woolf’s main argument of her work. Throughout history, women have been viewed as intellectually inferior to men, and, as such, the writing of women has been largely discouraged and censored. Woolf and other revolutionary female writers were able to use this discrimination as an obstacle that their writing had to overcome. Her argument comes from the fact that it is extremely difficult for women to write great works when they are struggling to survive in their daily lives which shoves art into the back of their minds. Woolf claims that “these difficulties [indifference and material circumstances] were infinitely
From the outset, literature and all forms of art have been used to express their author’s feelings, opinions, ideas, and believes. Accordingly, many authors have resorted to their writing to express their feminist ideas, but first we must define what feminism is. According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, feminism is “the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state”. As early as the fifteenth century is possible to find feminist writings. Centuries later, and although she never referred to herself as one, the famous English writer Virginia Woolf became one of the greatest feminist writers of the twentieth
One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.
