Aren't all these writers form an educated class therefore, privileged to a degree?
Victoria Ocampo is certainly, as is everyone we've read from a certain privileged class, because they are educated. I don't espect many women who are uneducated in the higher academics get published very much. Even though she wrote this 70 years ago, I found alot of it still relevent and very funny. I am not sure what post- structuralist is. Is it something like writng against essentialism, because she is doing some of that yes. For gender any way, and she does touch on class-essentialism too, for example on page 231, she writes, "...It is also evident that the quantity of innate talent that a person possesses depends for its realizations and expression upon the outlets it encounters for its development, and these in turn depend upon such factor relaive to environment as economic resources, social resources, social climate, and existing educational systems. An apparent reason why the children of the upper classes have proportionately better results in their studies than the children of the lower classes is that they have had more opportunity to recieve a better education, whether or not they are gifted by heredity." Ok this is an argument that needs to be made today and everyday!!!! I work in the public shcool system and I know what is said about students who are from backgrounds that have experienced poverty. I also know our present regime believes in being very punitive to the public school system and its educating of these children, believing for the most part that these children have no value and that is why they would like to dismantle the public shcool system. Our educational system is institutionally racist and classist. There is a very powerful and influential belief in cultural, class, and race essentialism that premeates our institutions and those who legislate them. So, what Ocampo writes above can't be said enough or loud enough. I also though the way that she puts things, or writes things was extremely funny and clever, for example on page 229,"...man stop thinking of a woman as a colony for him to exploit and that she become instead 'the country in which he lives.' Ok that can be said over and over too, and is still relevent, although perhaps not for homosexuals. I also thought it was interesting when she wrote about women have learned to enjoy letting men mistreat them, "...as it is also true that men, for their part, have learned to enjoy allowing themselves to mistreat women.' I don't know that women enjoy being mistreated, and I am sure many women would never allow this. I am also sure women sometimes had no choice but to put up with the abuse, because there were no support systems in place for her to escape the abuse. But perhaps what she is saying is that these things of course are not biological but learned, and therefore can be unlearned. I also loved what she wrote on page 231, "What men, apart from a minority that I bless, do not seem to understand is that we are not at all interested in taking their place...but in taking our own completely..." I agree, and I personally have not learned to do this, and am in the process of trying to achieve this. Find my own voice, my own independence from negative and distructive forces, whether they are from within or without.