Linda Daly
Well I remember participating in a burn the bra protest in about 1969. I also remember the push for women to have access to birth control, including abortion and how the pill made it possible for everyone to have a real good time without too much fear of an unwanted pregnancy. The lesbian aspect was always there though as a double edged sword of getting too involved with feminist issues, would make people question your sexual orientation. I do think that feminism has been responsible for more women having more access to a variety of careers and promotion opportunities that did not used to be available. Sexual harassment laws have also greatly improved working conditions in my own career. Equal pay for equal work, got me a $25,000.00 a year improvement in my paycheck over a 5 year period. So there really have been improvements that I can see in my lifetime. Race and class issues of equality are still of course at work. More disturbing has been the great increase in domestic violence. The issue of women as abusive with children, certainly has been a continued reality. I have done child protection work from late 2005 to mid 2008 in El Paso County and certainly I have seen women abuse their children, but more often the situation is neglect, complicated by poverty, poor education, poor mental health and poor parenting skills. A number of women have also been involved in substance abuse, which men have often been responsible for in exposing the women to drugs and encouraging their addiction. And there are still a lot of women having children whom they are not prepared to raise. Looking at feminism in literature as a method of criticism, I am wondering how it informs literature, other than as a social reality that should not be ignored? Is it really the underlying basis of the writing? It can be but then what happens to other theories that might hold equal apparent worth such as post structuralism or psychoanalysis? Does feminist criticism get a backseat if more than one critical approach can be taken to the same literature? How does a feminisgt perspective inform morality, truth and whether an idea has a center?
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I was raised by an outspoken "white and materially privileged" (hooks 2)feminist mother who encourage the reading of women writers such as Austin and the Brontes - she and her worldview informed everything in my literary life, which, blessedly, led me to other writings by women like Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldua and Amy Tan.
ReplyDeleteFeminism informs literature for me because it's how I was educated outside of school. If we listen to bell hooks and create "a mass-based educational movement," "founded on feminist principles for girls and boys, for women and men" (23) then feminist theory will not be forced to take a backseat to anything.
I know what you mean, Linda. Sometimes it seems that the feminist movement just gave women the opportunity to behave badly in ways that had been previously reserved for men. I think that's part of the mystification that continues to get in the way of true freedom for all humans. I wonder why we are so very immersed in our gender identity that we fail to work on our human identity.
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