Friedan’s Chapter One and Two Karly Marin Sacramento State University Communication Studies Major Gender Ideology Introduction Women play a pivotal role in the growth and development of social, economic and political spheres. There are countable women in the history of the world who have made remarkable contributions to the various spheres. Their accounts are recorded in books, magazines and journals amongst others. The Feminine Mystique is one of the books that received a wide audience in the 1950s. Written by Betty Friedan, the book is highly associated with the revolutions that led to the women liberation movements.
Beowulf is an excellent piece with a lot for the readers to desire and relate to while reading. This analysis explores different escapades while examining the role of women in the literature. One thing to point out is that female characters have always received very thin attention in different pieces of literature, something that has always made many people think that their role is meager. Every piece of literature has an important message to pass across to its intended audiences. Indeed, this study seeks to demystify the male-centric mindset to promote the visibility of women in the contemporary interpretation of literary works demonstrating that women play a greater role in the literature despite the proximity given to male protagonist.
She was the only girl in her family among several brothers, and a very rebellious one at that. She became feminist, and she makes it very clear in her writing. Her published works are very “independent woman” oriented. She writes about the image of women and how they should be able to do everything that men can. She wrote her first poem when she was ten years old, and her teacher at that time encouraged her to become
But due to the selection of few elite representatives, women writers have been forced to rediscover the past a new, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex. This perpetual disruption has led to a sense of alienation among them and prevented them from a sense of collective identity. Furthermore, she emphasizes social and economic condition of women showing a certain discomfort with the idea of a ‘female imagination’, which, for her, reiterates the familiar stereotypes further suggesting permanence, a deep, basic and inevitable difference between male and female ways of perceiving the world. The female literary tradition instead, she argues, is result of the ‘still-evolving relationships between women writers and their society’. Based on this evolutionary assumptions, she divides the female literary tradition into three main phases, namely, Feminine from 1840s to 1880s, Feminist from 1880s to 1920s and finally female from 1920 onwards, though
The second reason why I agree with this article is because Phillis Wheatley 's presence in the public sphere of 18th-century America gave her the ability to influence public political opinion. Her ability to create poetry despite being an enslaved black woman resulted in constant references to her transformation from barbarian to genius in the public 's eye. She became a recognizable figure, and this allowed her poetry and her beliefs to influence the perceptions of all slaves. A quote I found from Flanzbaum says "There was no great poetry in the eighteenth century, and Wheatley 's poetry was as good as the best American poetry of her age,"(Flanzbaum 59). Flanzbaum has described that poems from Phillis Wheatley where like no other poem, they were more unique to her because no poet would express the way she expresses her poems, they are a true definition of lyrical poems.
The relevance of this is that during the third wave of feminism female independence, both within society and literature, became more prevalent. Thus we can explore, using the feminist ideology of this era, how female independence within literature often gets a strongly negative connotation. When studying this novel from a feminist perspective, it is important to acknowledge that Walker favours the term ‘womanist’ for a black feminist. Walker’s commitment to womanism inspired not only ‘The Color Purple’, but many of her other novels including ‘Possessing the Secret of Joy’ (1992). Celie suffers over thirty years of physical and mental abuse.
I believe that every poem is close to this term in some way. Yvors Winters stated that poetry is “a statement in words about an experience”. Emily Dickinson never wrote poetry to make a living or for the sake of writing. She chose to write poetry because she could not live or express her life experiences without it. The poems which I selected are hopefully representative for the meaning behind her peculiar poetic style and the reason of her work.
Her epoch – making work, A Room of One’s Own(1927) and her other essays and papers state all about the women’s economic, cultural, social and educational status in the present time. She is the first to use the term ‘patriarchal value’ which must be fought against and the first major feminist writer devoting the patriarchal and sexist values, the presentation of women in literature and in fact in her case the political feminism has turned into a literal feminism. In 1949, The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir, a French writer is a radical work in which the radical aspect of feminist criticism was voiced for the first time and here she has suggested how the woman is actually the other, and also how she is on the margin or on the periphery in the patriarchal society. For throwing light on the radical aspect of feminist criticism, De Beauvoir has studied quite a number of so called revolutionary writers of female freedom like Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, John Genett and D.H.Lawrence and has found their presentations of women confront certain patriarchal stereo type. Women in D.H..Lawrence, Mailer, Miller and Genett play a secondary role and these writers’ radical views of sexual freedom of women center around the marginal role of women, the weaker sex.
One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.
She argued that female writers were excluded from African literature because of their own voice against oppression towards themselves, in particular, and towards African women in general. Female writers were very critical about the role of African women that was confined to house chores and