Feminist Lens

The most prevalent and popular stereotype of the post World war II era in America is one filled with women abandoning their wartimes jobs and retreating into the home to fulfill their womanly duties. In Joanne Meyerowitz’s Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, she shows how far women departed from this one dimensional image. While Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is reflexive and focused on the mainstream, Meyerowitz’s analysis is a broader and more inclusive exploration of media, as she draws upon multiple sources. Although Friedan effectively unveiled the thought process and reasoning behind society's belief that the message of media was to make women think that their place was to be the happy housewife, Meyerowitz expanded her media archives and found a differing message in analyzing both female responses to media and exploring their stories.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James has been critically acclaimed by numerous authors, philosophers and critics ever since the novel was originally published in 1898. The story of an unsuspecting governess who has been hired by a charming bachelor to take care of his niece and nephew is the perfect stomping ground for critics of all categories, however, the best criticism category I see fit for this suspenseful novel is a feministic one. The governess, whose name we are not told, traveled to a great estate in the countryside to look after two children, Miles and Flora. While there, she had strange encounters with the supernatural spirits of Mr. Quint and Miss Jessel, the previous chauffeur

The Puritans were a religious group who left the Church of England because they wanted to have more freedom with their religion. They thought the Church of England was “too Catholic”. They believed the Bible and its rules were the number one thing to go by and that all humans were evil and had to overcome their sin. Women had to cover their whole bodies in clothing. They couldn’t show their ankles or wrists. They also had to wear their hair up and out of their face at all times, except if they were in a room alone with only their husband. They always were on one side of the church away from the men or in the back on the church. These women in the society that will be talked about have broken laws and have been misjudged.

Throughout the years, different forms of literature  have generally shown women as weaker than men. They have played archetypes such as the mother archetype or the lover which have traits less desirable than the roles that men would take. These archetypes tend to limit their personalities and they become characters that are solely there for inconveniencing the hero. Stereotypes for women have affected these archetypes, but throughout history many people have made efforts to change these archetypes and make them more desirable. Even though archetypes for women have been shown as weak, it has changed throughout the years.

Most understand feminism as a movement that strides for political, economic, and social equality across gender lines. At its core, it is about dismantling oppression. Yet, everyone experiences oppression to a differing degree based on their social identities. To understand these differing forms of oppression and how they overlap, the idea of intersectionality must be added to feminism. But not too many people are familiar with what intersectional feminism is.

A “critical gendered lens” refers to the ability to develop an understanding of gender by examining the stereotypes and assumptions that accompany gender and sex. A “critical gendered lens” means that a person is able to question why sex and gender identification are so important in society. The authors use the example of sex identification at birth to explain what it means to have a “critical gendered lens”. They question why it is so important for people to accurately identify the sex of a baby, to the point where it is commonplace for girls to be dressed in pink and boys to be dressed in blue. A “critical gendered lens” is useful to the study of gender in communication, because it examines the infinite number of ways that people can communicate their gender.

Daddy’s princess. Big brother’s responsibility. Daddy’s little girl. Some people view these as a sweet pet names for young ladies, but these verbal cues inexplicitly condition women to view themselves as the property of men starting at a young age. These learned notions may take hold as women begin to develop. As young girls mature, they find themselves striving to please their fathers and other male figures as one of their main aspirations in life due to this conditioning from society. (Rholetter p. 1) The submissive nature of young girls is a common theme in literature, but looking through the Feminist Lens offers readers a better understanding of the struggle surrounding remaining submissive or demanding power occurs.

In the history of England, there have been many rulers, but none quite like the queens. Between the time of the first Queen of England and the present Queen, there have been many drastic changes. Though these two women share the same name, Elizabeth, they are known for their own contributions and styles during their life in the monarchy. Their eras were full of rich culture and historic importance. These two women made an impact on not only England, but all over the world. Their decisions and actions lead to both times of celebration and times of grievance.

Why is the feminist lens focused only on one perspective: females?. Throughout history females have being oppressed by sexism and racism ideologies, not only based on gender differences, but in skin color and body shape as we see in today’s society. Due to this reason, can men do Feminist theory?. To illustrate, “[men] do not have the life experiences of belonging to an oppressed group and [do not have] shared personal stories that reveal their wounds from patriarchy”(Klocke). This demonstrates that men can not be in the feminist theory because they didn't suffered the struggle and the pain that many women experienced in order to gain their natural rights. Moreover, of course males can relate and be part of the theory, but the main focus will

For our activism project, my sister, Maggie, and I went to the Ziibiwing Center in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. We live in the near-by village of Shepherd, so we decided to visit the Center while we were home for Easter break. I had been interested in visiting the Center for a number of years and saw this project as the necessary push to finally act on the desire. Mt. Pleasant is located right next to the reservation of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. At times is hard to tell where the reservation ends and the city begins. The Ziibiwing Center was opened in 2004 to help preserve the Anishinabe culture, honor their ancestors, and to educate people on the culture as well. The Anishinabe are the Ojibwe (Chippewa), the Odawa (Ottawa), and the Potawatomi.

My favourite constellation is Orion (the hunter). I chose this constellation because I am very interested in Greek mythology (which is where the story of this constellation comes from), and I often see this constellation in the night sky. Orion can be found throughout the world and is on the celestial equator. It is one of the most well-known constellations in the sky. Orion is most clearly visible from February to November. This constellation is comprised mainly of 7 stars - three make up Orion's belt, two make up his feet, and two make up his shoulders. Alnilam, Mintaka and Alnitak are the three stars in Orion's belt, Betelgeuse is his right shoulder, Bellatrix is his left shoulder, Rigel is his left foot and Saiph is his right foot.

As long as sexism exists within our society, it will exist within our literature. Depicting women as the submissive and therefore passive gender has been an age old occurrence within cultures. This is reflected in many aspects of societies from pop culture to history. A key contributor to the continuation of this is the unreliable, biased and sometimes outright manipulative narrative of these texts. This narrative, subjective in it’s art, not only affects how female roles play out in a plot but also heavily influence how the audience views the power dynamic between genders. Throughout Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, James K. Baxter’s He Waiata Mo Te Kare, and Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer all female characters have been passive victims or objects to their circumstance.

While discussing So Long a Letter in class, many of my fellow classmates had very interesting takes on what Mariama Ba may have meant in each section of the novel. They had ideas on the internal fight between tradition and modernity, and also respect for the independence Ramatoulaye gains throughout the novel. What I found intriguing was that almost each of my classmates had a different idea, and while most ideas were followed with textual evidence, they were not the same ideas that I had while reading. My classmates opened my eyes to the many different parts of the story that I did not notice on my own. They focused on different themes of the story and within the themes could point out topics they agreed or disagreed with. When I started doing research and finding my peer reviewed sources for this paper, I quickly realized that it was the same case throughout the sources. While no two sources were alike and many had very interesting takes on the novel I decided to choose the two that stuck with me the most. These were Teaching Mariama Bas So Long a Letter in a Women & Literature Course by Lisa Williams and “A Feminist Just like

Girls, young women, and mature mothers. Society has consistently given women strict guidelines, rules and principles on how to be an appropriate member of a man’s society. These rules are set at a young age and enforced thoroughly into adulthood. When not followed accordingly, women often times too many face reprimanding through means of verbal abuse, physical abuse, or social exile. In the midst of all these strict guidelines and social etiquette for girls, a social rebellion started among girls and women and gender roles were broken, however the social rebellion did not and does not affect all girls and women. For instance, in less socially developed places, young girls on the brink of womanhood are still strongly persuaded to be a man’s idea of a “woman”.

Feminist perspective developed with the ideology that women face large amounts of inequalities in a patriarchal society. They aimed to address and rid the social world of this oppression of women by men. According to Bishop, (2015) “oppression occurs when one group of people use different forms of power to keep another group down in order to exploit them. The oppressor uses the power; the oppressed are exploited” (p. 133-134). Oppression must be by individual experience and not grouped into being the same for all. This includes understanding the original ideology of feminist theory being critiqued as only considering the experiences of middle class, white women. That black women, of lower class experienced oppression much different from the other women. Women are oppressed, thus has to be understood in a different construct that women are similar in some sources, experience of oppression but also experience oppression very differently from one individual to another. Feminist theories have further been expanded do its continuation throughout society and decades to encompass many more issues and arenas than just men and women relationships. Now it seeks to understand and address oppression based on culture, race, class, etc and not only for women but for all. Therefore, Bishop (2014) outlines five components that seem common to all forms of oppression and serve to maintain its presence in society.