Lucy Westenra presents a rejection to motherhood when she eats the body of a child and throws it away. ‘the new woman represented a threat not only to the social order, but also to the natural order.’-101 ‘the child that she had clutched strenuously to her breast’ p.188 ‘scientific research defined a woman entirely in terms of body, one which characterised women’s bodies as devoid of passion. Science greatly feared sexual excess, which it felt could lead to men’s debilitation, which in turn could weaken the entire race. Since men’s passion was considered strong and more naturally inclined to excess, the controls were, instead, placed on women. The idolisation of motherhood was partly aimed to control female sexuality and curtail the threat
Introduction The American Revolution was a very long and extensive war that lasted from 1775 until 1783, and as a result America gained its independence. It is very imperative to highlight the significant role that women played during the American Revolution. During this era a woman was often portrayed as illiterate, child-bearing mother, and a homemaker.
When normally timid women, rendered even more so by pregnancy, triumphed over the terror of death (Saxton 30). If death did occur during childbirth, the women is heavily praised for their sacrifice. When it came to being a mother, women were religious teachers to their children. She was to work as hard as she could, instilling the principles of religion in her babies and catechizing them as soon as they can speak (31). To righteous puritan mothers the path of god was a must for their children.
In her pilgrimage to fight for women’s rights, activist Margaret Sanger created a speech on a severely controversial topic not only during her time period, but during our present time period as well. While many firmly disagreed with her and still do, she did bring to light a major disparity between sexes and social classes. By vocalizing her qualms with the rights of women, mainly in the middle and lower classes, to decide for themselves if they wish to have children or not. By voicing her opinions in an extremely misogynistic era she made herself a totem in women’s history. Women do have a right to decide for themselves if they wish to have children or not.
These unmarried women wants to “fulfill their noble tasks of motherhood”(p132). One of the motivation is they feel a sense of loneliness because many of them experience sentiments of insufficiency and uneasiness in a society surrounded by people who are in harmonious conjugal relationships(131). Moreover, even though numbers of “women are unlikely to marry, but “would need a child to take care of them in their old age” (132). A program implemented “encourage women to adopt an intensified focus on their bodies as the locus of their ‘femaleness’”(132).
During the 1800’s and early 1900s, women were considered to be inferior to men in some aspects due to religion, laws, and society’s outlook on both genders. In fact, because of these factors, some people believed that women suffered from passionlessness during that time. Passionlessness “convey the view that women lacked sexual aggressiveness, that their sexual appetites contributed a very minor part (if any at all) to their motivations, that lustfulness was simply uncharacteristic” (Cott 220). The rise of passionlessness in the 1800s was due to the evangelical beliefs people had during the time. Since religion was a big factor in society, women were in a way forced to follow the norm in which they were forbidden to express the same
Women with Post-Partum Depression are often degraded as mothers, women who work are often judged, and women who choose not to have children at all are criticized. While woman’s rights have indeed come a long way from the expectation of a 19th-century woman, there is still inequality. A Doll House is still relevant today because many women face the same issues he presented, and until the genders are truly equal, it will stay
Sethe embraces the dominant values of idealised maternity. Sethe’s fantasy is
There are many parallels between contracted motherhood and the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel, women are treated purely as fertility objects devoid of any rights in a patriarchal society. For some women entering contracted motherhood, they will be controlled by the fathers. For instance, in a particular pre-birth contract a woman had to agree to not taking medication without a doctor’s order, and to follow all of the doctor’s orders (Ketchum 626). The author also connects contracted motherhood with prostitution, each activity ‘rents’ a woman’s body.
One of the ways a misogynistic culture suppresses the woman is to question her role as wife and mother. Literature, in particular, feeds this culture in regards to how an author portrays the mother in the context of their relationship with their children. In particular, the relationship between the mother and daughter. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow explains the difference between “mothering” and “fathering” from the viewpoint of a feminist in 1978. She states while the female adult would be “mothering” a child, a mother would never be accused of “fathering” a child because it is not a nurturing role.
After reading Scheper-Hughes’ individual work, and after learning the views on breastfeeding in the harsh living conditions of the Alto, the question is raised of a possible additional body: the literal body, bound by the biological need for
Women’s Body The Figuration of the female body is well described in both Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both novels show that the women bodies are not their own and controlled by others which it turned into an object in order to survive. In this paper, I would like to argue how the objectification of the female bodies in both novels resulted in their oppression and sufferings. Moreover, what is the definition of the figuration of a body to both Offred and Firdaus? And is there a way out to survive this tragedy in both novels?
The mother-child border is entangled in the complex and multi-faceted image of the castrating mother. According to Freud, man fears that of the mother as castrated and as that of the cannibalistic all devouring mother. “Construction of a patriarchal ideology unable to deal with the threat of sexual differences as it is embodied in the images of the feminine as archaic mother and is seen as the castrated mother.” (Creed, 1993, p.22) Kristeva suggests that the notion of the castrated women is to ease mans fear of woman, who has the power to psychologically and physically castrate him.
Women’s bodies are already constituted as open and vulnerable, so the porousness of the post-human body further positions them as the pathological user. This porousness can be seen as emasculating for men, as they are deemed “nerds” for exhibiting fannish, consumerist behaviour – typically seen as a feminised attitude. Additionally, male post-human bodies also categorises them as “the aggressor” who is “terrifying and dangerous” (Overell 2015, Lecture
They have surrounded to men’s tyranny and ended up with nothing but self-pity. In fact, it could have been quite different. We should have understood the function of our own bodies and attracted and controlled men that way, and then tamed them. (…) Yet a woman’s sex is her magic weapon for defeating the outside world and revealing the significance of her existence (…)
Therefore the psychological aspect of motherhood is taken as one of the key factors in understanding maternal behaviour; the theorists so far have blamed this aspect of motherhood for serving the patriarchal design - the perpetration of gender-inequality. The vicious cycle that has gone on from mother to daughter and then from the daughter who now becomes a mother to her own daughter, for centuries, may be attributed to it. This aspect highlights the uniqueness of the mother-daughter bond. The psycho analyst and feminist, Nancy Chodorow, has explained maternal behaviour on psychological basis and asserted that the sociological aspects could be of secondary