Sue Ellen Browder Summary

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Book Critique “Since progress was inevitable and since a dive spark nestled within each human consciousness, nothing more was necessary to correct apparent social disorders than to remove the outmoded obstacles inherited from the past. ”(Banner ix) The book Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights, written by Lois W. Banner, the author was focusing on the impact Cady Stanton made on the movement for women’s suffrage, as well as the intimate influence she received from her family while growing up. This book could also be seen as a biography, but besides jus focusing on her life, Banner focused on Cady Stanton’s achievement, and how history began to change.

It only makes sense that feminism has a modern and outdated definition, and that like people, feminism changes. Feminism changes with time and is diversified with new perspectives and realizations of oppression. Women’s oppression has been prevalent since the invention of agriculture. When groups of people are oppressed generally these oppressed people must group together to fight the oppressor and change the establishment they live in.

The title of the article is a reference to what the Nazis believed the ideal embodiment of a woman, only concerns children, kitchen and church. This article was considered one of the earliest feminist critiques of how psychology had neglected, omitted, and made myths about women. It has been reprinted over 42 times in six different languages and been included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women’s Liberation Movement. Other notable works include, “Neural Symbolic Activity,” “An Object-Superiority Effect,” and “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Human Brain”. Weisstein lived through a long battle of Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS).

The revival of feminism emerged as a powerful one in Europe and America in the late 1960’s to revive political and social issues associated with women’s actual participation in western culture. While Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the earliest agitators on behalf of fair sex, claimed for their liberty of will in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Women in England, Margaret Fuller had agitated for women’s movement in the middle of the 19th century in America, by showing in her well known book Women in the Seventeenth Century how the women have been marginalized in our society. By the end of the 19th century, J.S.Mill brought out a pamphlet entitled The Subjection of Will in which he, like Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, sought more equality

First, Friedan stresses the severity of Freud’s ideas by stating, “It is a Freudian idea...that has trapped so many American women today,” and “the new mystique is much more difficult...to question...because the mystique is broadcast by the very agents...that are supposed to be the chief enemies of prejudice…” Freud had many ideas and theories concerning why women were not happy in their roles as housewives and mothers. One such concept was penis envy, which was seized in this country as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women. When women showed their desire to grow, their ambitions were brushed off as penis envy, and this strengthened the mystique. Friedan argues that this Freudian thought was embraced by academics and intellectuals across America, and women accepted it since it would be difficult to counter such established ideas. When penis envy, basically the view that women could never really be man’s equal, was so prevalent, how could women grow and achieve self

Ford goes on to discuss the scrutiny that Wollstonecraft faced during the 1970’s. After the 1970’s, Wollstonecraft was reappraised with the second wave in 1994. Susan Gubar and others accepted Wollstonecraft as a vital source as the founder of feminism. With Wollstonecraft’s work “Vindications of the Rights of Woman,” explained as “the founding feminist text in English.” In his 16 page excerpt of Wollstonecraft, he goes over the scrutinies, the appraisals and the great work that was written over the years.

For instance, Cathy Ames was one of the character who standed out in the novel, which made the audience aware of who she was and is a big comparison to other characters throughout the book. Adam told Charles that him and Cathy got married. Which makes Cathy leave to the bedroom and closing the door. Charles say negative things about Cathy “She’s no damn good, I tell you.

This womanist conceptualization is shown by a nuanced destruction by Dee’s response to the quilt, which is the main metaphor in the story. A typical political rhetoric is represented in the character of Dee. This is a rhetoric which is more aggressive than mature, showier than subtle. Dee ends up in simplifying and commodifying culture, instead of relating it to any meaningful way. She comes out as a being who takes activism as a fad rather than a commitment.

The Feminine Mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique”. Education had played a big part in opening up women’s roles outside of domesticity. She created a society in which women wanted to live in. Women had found this new society appealing so they had begun to endorse women’s activism and fought against their suffrages by taking on jobs that men typically held, gaining an education, and taking a stand to end female

Such wives are foolish mothers”(106). Therefore she wants cherry woman to lift herself from the state of degradatish to which they have been reduced and empower to which they have been reduced and empower themselves so that they can empower themselves and their children to lead fulfilling lives. The liberationists of the 1980’s and 1990’s also regarded motherhood and mothering as sheer wastage of powerful feminist energy, in the home and the household which they viewed as an area of “ arrested social development.”

The Harlem Renaissance was an era when African- Americans brought their talents to Harlem at the end of World War I (Wormser). Out of that era, it brought authors, poets, and scholars (Wormser). Zora Neil Hurston came out of this era and became a well-known author. The Sweat is one of her well-known stories that demonstrated literary realism to show their everyday life and how they would talk unlike romanticism that used nature and “imagination” (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). The Sweat can be considered as a literary cannon which means a book that has been approved by culture ("A Literary Canon?") and that’s what Zora did.