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Feminist Synthesis Essay's Under The Black Flag

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"Man the mast!", "Down with the sails, she's going down!" the captain barks orders out of fear of losing the beloved ship and his life. The storm is the worst this vessel has ever seen. As you look to your left for help tying the rope your friend Thomas reaches out a hand to assist. Once the rope is secure you make your way below deck to thank him but as you turn the corner, you see him take his shirt off to ring out the water and realize that "he" is not a "he" at all; Thomas is a woman. Within the Golden Age of Piracy, many women have been involved in expeditions on the seven seas. Throughout history we have seen the patriarchal society built by man (pun intended) and through various reasons, women were viewed as inferior. While times have changed and gotten better, have they changed THAT much? Women in today’s society …show more content…

They typically did housework their job was to raise children. The influence of these views from society carried over to the ships and crews. We see that many pirates and captains did not allow women on board their ships or to be a part of their crews. In Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly, we see that Mary Read and Anne Bonny both joined crews while being disguised as men and proved to be just as capable at the tasks that were done by men on board. This is proven because the men were surprised to find that Anne and Mary were in fact women because they had functioned just as equally as men did. In fact, Anny Bonny and Mary Read were surprised to find that the other was a female. Cordingly explains that even though Captain Jack Rackman knew Anne Bonny to be a female when he married her, it was still necessary for her to dress and act as a man on board ship (Cordingly 57). To dress as a man was to take advantage of the freedoms offered to men over women. The upsetting truth is that these same freedoms, as stated before, were not offered to

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