Emily's Thoughts
In A Lighter Vein:
This poem made me question whether gender based oppression has become more hegemonic in our culture as it has become larger in scope. As many have observed, our culture is becoming more unified in this country (more being the operative word here, since there is still large regional and local cultural differences). The author said that men are to blame for the oppression of women. Today I don't feel as though one could make that claim. I have questions about whether or not that claim was completely true for the time she wrote it, but there seems to have been more blatant gender oppression then and more hegemonic and systematic oppression now. If I am wrong about this and the oppression was as hegemonic then as now, then how does hegemony operate in small systems?
It was so interesting to read these writings by women who thought that sex was the devil and that the key to gender liberation was liberation from sex. Now perhaps it is obligatory sex that is what they needed to escape. However, it seems as though the worldview of the author was that, for 'good' women, all sex was imposed by men and was hence obligatory. Any sex that wasn't pushed on a woman by a man was slutty. Thus the only escape for women was no sex. Is this really what was in the text, or was I reading into things here?
The Book of the City of Ladies:
Her explanations of what misogyny exists are not ones I totally agree with; however, I'm not sure how useful it is for me to disagree with them, since Bijns wrote this hundreds of years ago and is not a part of general argument today. I guess that is a question then: How useful is it to agree or disagree with an author fro so long ago that doesn't have any noticeable barring on modern day discourses?
I was a bit taken aback when she said that married women should probably just accept their position because "sometimes it is not the best thing for a person to be free." That one came out of left field for me... She's advocating for good ladies to escape men and go to live in this city of their own and yet she's telling married women to say where they are. What if the married women are getting raped by their husbands?
Disenchantments of Love:
I was a bit confused. Were these excerpts supposed to be cut off in mid-sentence?
These 'disenchantments' sounded rather like the consciousness raising group of the women's liberation movement (except with men present and not so much about personal experience).
It was interesting how often the beauty of the disenchanters was mentioned. The men in the audience were almost angry about what the women were saying, but their beauty caused them to give up. I can tell if this is a tactical thing (putting beauty into the picture to not seem so radical) or if it is just the way the author was thinking.