just some general comments for the 26th of Jan
(I will admit right at the start that due a cold obvious in every part of my body I wasn’t able to read the other comments or postings; I will catch up on that before class on Thursday, I just hope that my comments don’t coincide with anyone else’s.)
After reading Wollstonecraft, my initial response is: We have heard all this before. Men are not set as equal in any society (though it is getting better in the world), women are not educated, there are problems with parenting one sex and the other; everything essentially is a result of power and control; lack of obedience of the lesser sex opens the doors for hatred. I feel like she keeps going in circles discussing what for us today is the good old material. However, in her arguments, she Wollstonecraft tends to make general statements, talking about the general woman, the general man, therefore making her arguments all fit one scale – when in reality we know that individualism rules. I feel like she doesn’t give place to the non-ordinary woman or man alike; her personalities are all of a certain extreme – they are either all bad (manly) or all good (womanly).
As far as the education of women is concerned, in a way I feel it connected to the “Pedagogía del oprimido” where Freire brings up that not only the integration of education will bring success; it is the need to educate the oppressed (which in our case could be the women) that their becoming un-oppressed doesn’t mean that they will become oppressors as they see that being the only other alternative in life. There are more than just two extremes here as well. I think there is a certain danger that women would become men because that’s the only other way they know is in existence.
Wollstonecraft’s suggesting that an unhappy marriage was advantageous to the family has me a little shocked.
I found it interesting that whenever a woman is talked about in de Gouges, she is talked about in relation to the family, to the husband, or to the household as if there was no other place for a woman, disconnected from the ‘natural’ position of a life-giver, caretaker etc. She does discuss the political realm, and the necessity of equality there, but it comes back to the subject of morals and her role in that family-related environment.