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Shakespeare's Sister And Girls Against Boys Essay

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Virginia Woolf’s story “Shakespeare’s Sister” and the essay “Girls Against Boys” by Katha Pollitt are two texts that talk about feminism. “Shakespeare's sister” talks about how it would have been different if shakespeare had a sister. If shakespeare had a sister she wouldn't of had the same choices like him because she was a women. Pollitt's essay talks about how women are seen differently from men especially in universities. The argument for both text is gender discrimination and feminism because they both believe that women are not equal to men just because they are women. Both texts have the same argument, but tell it in different ways. Woolf’s story and Pollitt’s story have the same argument, but use different devices to make their argument clear. The two text don’t have similar …show more content…

When they were not accepted by society like men were. Also not all people understand an argument immediately. The author starts by explaining her fictional story and introducing her argument. She starts off by saying“It would have been impossible,completly and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of shakespeare in the age of shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say”.(Woolf) This quote shows how Woolf uses the hypothetical structure to introduce her argument and how she will explain it in a fictional story. She says that it would of been hard for a women to write in shakespeare's time only because they were women.It wouldn’t of matter if the woman was as gifted as william shakespeare. This problem would be called gender discrimination and this is the author's argument, which can be hard to understand. Using a hypothetical structure helps make the argument be clear.Pollitt’s text is almost structured the same as “Shakespeare's story” because first she shows evidence that goes

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Do you know that Shakespeare is not the only gifted writer in his family? This mysterious member exists in the English writer Virginia Woolf’s imagination. In her famous essay “Shakespeare’s Sister,” Woolf uses the hypothetical anecdote of Judith Shakespeare as her main evidence to argue against a dinner guest, who believes that women are incapable of writing great literature. During the time when Judith is created, women are considered to be naturally inferior to men and are expected to be passive and domestic. Regarding her potential audience, educated men, as “conservative,” Woolf attempts to persuade them that social discouragement is the real cause of the lack of great female writers without irritating them by proposing “radical” arguments.

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This can be exhibited when she states “..that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.” Woolf desires to validate the idea that “woman cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” but intends to clarify that this is not due to a lack of talent or ability equal to that of men, but simply because the societal structures at the time rendered it impossible for them to be equally successful. In the development of her argument, Woolf starts out by exposing the belief that it was impossible for women to “have the genius of Shakespeare” and she contextualises the reader with some basic information, given by an authority figure “Professor Trevelyan” about women’s conditions during the era. Woolf then provides the reader with a hypothetical situation to ponder on: What if Shakespeare had had a sister — that is, a female sibling of

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