Analysis Of Catharine A. Mackinnon And The Afterword By Rebecca Mead Essay

The current counterculture and social upheavals of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war caused this new feminism to emerge, signaling the beginning of a transforming era in women’s history (TWE, 607). Women were tired of living in a man’s world where they

n the text reading Delinquent Daughters: “Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States” Author Mary Odom states raising the age of sexual consent in the U.S. increased the number of people prosecuted for statutory rape among consenting teenagers. Laws Predicated on the backs of the immigrants, native Blacks, and Mexican workers who had consensual sex with the daughters of the white middle class or Working-class minorities under a Patriarchal rule. Odom states due to differences in the middle and working class sexual expression, too (avoid generalizing), Odom says the differences in the sexual expression of the middle class which operated within a patriarchal moral code, and the immigrant and working-class communities, who were more concerned with female chastity. (“Patriarchal structures of the preindustrial societies, diverse religious tradition, and codes of honor that associated family reputation with the morality of wives and daughters.” Odom states that in the United States fathers/men controlled both the workforce, labor and the “sexual lives of their wives’ children and servants in ways that supported the family economy” (p.43). One threat to Patriarchal control “was the out of wedlock birth” (p.44) Thus premarital chastity was influenced by religion and men and therefore, was highly regarded. Premarital sex was considered sinful, and the double standard of sexual roles was at work as “sexual promiscuity would destroy a woman’s honor, while

Feminism walks in tangent aiming to be equal with men and not subservient. It is not hard to see how the feminism movement was birthed with ideas such as piety being an important characteristic for a woman while men were excused as being lustful beings. One can connect this to modern day feminism with celebrities such as Amber Rose and Kim Kardashian who many may deem as impure for dressing to revealing. They are breaking conventional stereotypes, set before the antebellum period, of purity in woman. I believe that a woman should have the necessities needed to live a free nearly unbothered life such as their male counterparts. Barbara Welter’s article can be interpreted many ways. One being as a lens to see society during the antebellum period through the gaze of a women. Welter does this well by using various magazine exerts within the text to give the audience a wider sense of the antebellum era rather than just a shorty anecdote. Another to look at this text is, as a way to highlight the situations which women had to endure, which eventually led to the women’s right movement shortly after the Civil

While Western Civilization: Volume 2: Since 1500 by Jackson J. Spielvogal and Wikipedia overlap at certain points, Spielvogal’s book provides a large overview of the feminist movement in the 1960s to 1980s. Compared to Spielvogal, Wikipedia goes more in-depth with the people involved, the issues they were fighting for, and the laws they were able to get passed. Even though they have their differences, both are informative and give the reader an acceptable idea as to the feminist movement of the 1960s to 1980s.

Being that the majority of the characters in the novel are male, as the reader, you might not quit grasp the concept of feminism right away. Feminism is widespread throughout the story and gradually portrays a clear image of what life was like for women. Some women go along with the concept by obeying and others go against it and live their own way. This, in so many ways, allows for understanding of the life of women during this time.

Sexuality has an inherent connection to human nature. Yet, even in regards to something so natural, societies throughout times have imposed expectations and gender roles upon it. Ultimately, these come to oppress women, and confine them within the limits that the world has set for them. However, society is constantly evolving, and within the past 200 years, the role of women has changed. These changes in society can be seen within the intricacies of literature in each era. Specifically, through analyzing The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one can observe the dynamics of society in regards to the role of women through the lens of the theme of sexuality. In both novels, the confinement and oppression of women can be visibly seen as a result of these gender roles. Yet, from the time The Scarlet Letter was published to the time The Bell Jar was written, the place of women in society ultimately changed as well. Hence when evaluating the gender roles that are derived from sexuality, the difference between the portrayals of women’s oppression in each novel becomes apparent, and shows how the subjugation of women has evolved. The guiding question of this investigation is to what extent does the theme of sexuality reflect the expectations for women in society at the time each novel was written. The essay will explore how the literary elements that form each novel demonstrate each author’s independent vision which questions the

I sincerely mean that when I say I did not know. The fact that in 1974 Congress passed a ban on sex discrimination is actually just surprising because I never realized that women were discriminated this severely. Just by reading I was almost felt as if I was being offended by Sylvia Peterson’s client. To me it sounds like people just did not have a filter. Her client said to her when she asked why she was given the cold shoulder after buying a house, “‘Well, you bought this house,” her client retorted. “You can't buy a house without being married” (Collins 251). How about we stop jumping to conclusions? I have gotten a sense that this book is just full of conclusion jumpers. For example, women are just automatically bad at sports and if you did this then that means you did that. I think it is pretty sad actually that Sylvia was not even able to buy herself a house without getting attacked, even after doing nothing

The main argument in the book is that women are part of a much more complex process and that involves whom they become based on their selections and how these selections shape their future.

This novel’s misogynistic perspective divulges the social-turmoil America experienced after World War II. During this period, a multitude of male American population enlisted to join the war consequently, women took on stereotypical ‘male jobs’. When the war ended, veterans returned home and expected women to return to their traditional duties, an expectation they challenged. As a result, this period witnessed a power-imbalance between the pre-existing patriarchal mindset and matriarchy rule which gave birth to the second wave feminism. Kesey exemplifies this by portraying dominating female characters as castrators and overpowering figures who emasculate and damage men, notably in Mrs Bibbit’s over-protecting and condescending power which manages

Jessica Valenti’s 2009 novel, The Purity Myth, explains how “America’s obsession with virginity is hurting young women,” by citing and explaining just some of the infinite excuses behind this theory. As a writer, Jessica Valenti has written multiple other books regarding women, double standards, and the essentials of feminism. In other books like “Full Frontal Feminism (2007),” and “Yes Means Yes (2008),” Valenti has a strong reputation to stand up for women and women’s rights. In her newest novel, “Sex Object: a Memoir (2016),” Valenti tells accounts of how male sexuality is not seen as vulgar as women’s.

Levy further asserts her binary comparison in a temporal manner by comparing the feminism of the past with the feminism of the present, as she claims “in recent years, the term feminism has fallen further and further out of favour” (Levy, 86). By framing her own views of feminism as those belonging to an earlier point in the timeline, she privileges these views as “original” or “authentic”. Yet this does not acknowledge that the “anti-porn wars” of the 80’s was a point at which feminism branched out, rather than transitioned from one set of beliefs to another. As a result, the cultural changes that she observed occurred in the presence of both stances of feminism, making it difficult to distil the cause. Levy privileges past over present in her suggestion

A statement that Julia Wood made in the Epilogue stood out to me. She says that “As women and men, you can affect what society expects of and admires in each sex” (Wood, 321). This showed me that we have the ability to impact the gender roles society holds. It is important to not judge a father for deciding to stay home while the mother works

Not only did she want the reader to see what occurs to women, but she really wanted the reader to connect with what she was writing. It is very easy for a reader to just read through the book and not really put any second thought into the true meaning of the book. By Atwood using strong sentence structure and extreme wording throughout the book, it makes it much easier for the reader to connect and relate to the things being said. It is easy for a reader to identify an issue and talk about it. Atwood’s main purpose of this book is to spark a conversation, and if not that, at least to create that little thought in the

This book features a collection of Judith Butler’s essays and her primary intention with this collection is to “focus on the question of what it might mean to undo restrictive normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life” (12). These essays look at the construction of gender and the way certain conceptions of it are normalized and reproduced in potentially harmful and limiting ways. Butler uses a feminist poststructural framework to critique the normalizing/marginalizing views of gender that exist because the “terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, out-side oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically

In 1990 Judith Butler first published her book Gender Troubles, where she questions gender roles. Butler theorizes that gender, as in male and female, is a type of societal/gender colonialism created to keep people who do not fall within the gender roles from being part of the mainstream society. In her 1999 preface, in which she addresses the impact her book had in the decade since its original publication, Butler expresses the concern she had with the “heterosexual assumption in feminist literary theory (61).” Butler utilizes the works of other feminist philosophers to further demonstrate the inconsistency, and disconnect between fighting for women rights and fighting for human rights. Judith Butler makes an interesting argument on the failure to recognize the spectrum of gender, however, she makes a compelling argument on the use of language perpetuating a patriarchal society.