WS

– Implies ethical and intellectual contract between student and teacher
– Don’t think of yourself as receiving an education, think of yourself as claiming one.
-What you learn at college is how men perceived and organized their experience, their history, their ideas, etc. (when you read/hear about “great issues”, you are hearing about what men (white men) have decided is important

– Feminism is a movement to end sexism (doesn’t imply that men were the enemy)
– Most people don’t think sexism is a problem; most people think feminism is always/only about women seeking equal rights to men
– The misunderstood idea that the feminist movement is was anti-male carried with it the false assumption that all female space would be a place where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent

– Pageant contestants epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women
– Women in society are forced daily to compete for male approval, by beauty standards we ourselves are supposed to take seriously
– Miss America is a walking commercial for the Pageant’s sponsors
– We encourage American myth that oppresses men as well as women: the win or you’re worthless competitive disease
– The “beauty contest” creates only one winner to be “used” and forty-nine losers who are “useless”

Feminism is still needed because there are many pre-feminist limitations and expectations that are still present in society
Women are expected to look good and perform as well as male counterparts
Women are a small portion of educational faculty and they are unsatisfied

When victimized a person fails to see how they reinforce someone else’s subordination.
Reconceptualizing race, class, and gender
Dichotomous (either/or) thinking and ranked dichotomous thinking keeps systems of oppression in place
Institutional- controlled by elite white men
Societal ideologies- symbolic images alter our judgement
Individual- Carry effects of our lives within multiple structures
Breaking barriers for social change
Must recognize oppression creates problems in relationships
Build coalitions and relationships for social change
Individual accountablity- empathy

Black, lesbian, feminist in an inter-racial relationship- part of many marginalized groups
In order to have a successful future there cannot be any hierarchies of oppression
Division of identities roadblock for political action
Must fight all oppressions

She was ridiculed, but words cannot deter her longing for being in this world
• No angel protected her or her children
• She could not shield them from the ignorance of the outside world
• She looked for salvation, but god didn’t find her
• She stands alone
• It is her right to be free
•The Lord leads her to Freedom
•These girls have suffered for years
•The girls like Sojourner

We assume gender is bred into our genes
• It’s created out of social interaction and social life.
• Everyone “does ” gender
• Gender construction starts at birth w/ genitalia
• Gender= social institution. Main way of how people organize their lives.

o Menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event
o Men would brag about how long and how much
o Boys would mark the onset of menses, the longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties.

• “Once more I looked up Women, found Position of, and turned to the pages indicated. Wife beating. I read that it was recognized as a right of man and was practiced without shame by high as well as low”
• Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice in the times of Shakespeare.
• Neither Shakespeare’s women nor those of authentic 17th century memoirs, like the Vemey’s and the Hutchinson’s seem wanting in personality and character.
• Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare women do not seem wanting in personality and character
• After looking at Shakespeare’s works it becomes obvious that it would be impossible for a woman in those days to achieve the status of him because
• If a woman in Shakespeare’s day would have had his Genius, her fate would’ve likely been death.
• For a woman to become a writer and write in silence would have been impossible unless they possessed immense wealth.