Response to "Grimke"
"It is troubling that many of the problems and issues women faced in 1837 we are still struggling with. One of the things that really kind of irritates me is that she seems to say that the way women dress and what they find fun are the equivalent to asking to be treated unequally. If a woman takes an interest in fashion then she is asking to be not taken seriously? Really? That is almost like saying women who dress provocatively deserve to be sexually assaulted. Men have had equal and sometimes greater interests in clothing and fashion throughout history and nobody took them less seriously. I think she is identifying the wrong contributing factors and coming to some very distressing conclusions. I would instead ask why it is that men aren’t taught general housekeeping. This is a cultural problem not one that a woman can solve by dressing more plainly and by discouraging flattery. The problem is rooted in centuries of mistreatment that goes back before recorded history. I think the greater sin is to feel one must change the core of themselves in order to be accepted by the opposite sex. She is asking everything of women and nothing of men."
I would disagree. In fact, it seems to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Grimke’s message. What she asks for is a compromise, a middle ground. In her letter, “Man Equally Guilty with Woman in the Fall”, Grimke alludes that society is at fault for a lot of the problems women have. What I think she is trying to get at is that women’s roles have been decided for them by men, and in order to remove the men from power, women need to re-envision their role in society, because the men obviously won’t do it for them. She is not out to ask women to sacrifice the little influence they have in society, but to change their influence so that the roles previously assigned to them by a male dominated society no longer thrust women into a position where they are nothing more than an object whose purpose is to serve man. It may be a mistake to ask women to let go of their interest in fashion; however, Grimke believes that a complete and total change is necessary for women to achieve the goal of social equality with men, and like Descartes said, “One should destroy the old city of the mind [in order to] build a new one.”