Today we read about women and literature, as well as watched a movie. The focus of today’s class I felt was breaking the norm and how women have been placed into stereotypical roles.
In Virginia Wolff’s A Room of One’s Own it talked about the suppression of women. The article talks about William Shakespeare’s hypothetical twin sister. The article talks about his sister as though she is truly the brilliant one and it uses this to demonstrate how women were oppressed. The article is about how women were excluded from the educated and literary world. She talks, using the twin as her example, about how it must have been for a woman during that time who were just as gifted but were never given the opportunity to learn and excel in the academic realm. I think that it is a really good interpretation of the hardships that a woman would have faced was trying to break the mold. Wolff herself was a rarity; she was a woman author during a period when there were very few women who chased a life outside of being a mother. She is essentially writing about how women would be put down by everyone, men and women alike, even if they were the most talented purely because of their gender.
Castellanos article, Woman and Her Image, however looks at how women have allowed men to treat them this way. The article speaks about how women conform to traditional values and ideas and don’t try and change what is acceptable. It talks about women making themselves into mannequins and relying on men. This dependence on men and what they think of women, be it attractiveness or domestication, has made it harder for women to push forward and achieve equality.
One of the reoccurring themes in this class is the idea of women and a rise to power. In the beginning women were the ones with all the power, but over time men gained all of the authority. The texts today looked at how women have given away the power and how as a culture we have allowed women to become objectified.
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