Apropos of recent discussions, check out UC Hastings College of Law's web site on gender bias in the workplace: Gender Bias Learning Project.

Comparison between Women/Fiction and Minorities/Fiction

Hurston makes an interesting (although perhaps obvious) point: "minorities do think...about something other than the race problem," implying that there are stories to be had that are simultaneously uniquely minority-oriented while not about this "race problem". I found this to be quite similar to how Natalia's friend viewed women in movies or other works: they had to be in there for a reason other than as the love interest of a male character.

Did anyone else see this similarity? Does anyone else agree with these thoughts?

Questions about your drafts

Today's questions were:

1. What's the problematic [the question that the paper answers]?

2. What is the hypothesis (i.e. the claim, the point)?

3. If someone were to tell you the hypothesis, how much demonstration would you need in order to believe it? (None, one example, 6-8 pages?)

4. Describe the structure of the argument (list, ordered list, logical sequence...).

5. How can the author make the argument more complex?

6. Other suggestions?

An exam review sheet will be on bspace sometime today.

I Capture the Castle vs. A Room of One's Own

As reading I Capture the Castle I have noticed that Dodie Smith does not fall under the stereotype of women writers that Virginia Woolf has explained. In A Room of One's Own Woolf describes Mary Carmichael's book, Life's Adventure, as lacking care and not being herself in her writing. Smith is far from this because her novel includes a lot of emotion and feeling from the narrator Cassandra. This novel is all of her journals entries so there is obviously a great amount of her true feelings in this novel. This is not an autobiography, but I feel that Smith is being quite true to herself and not trying to be someone else to please the male writers of the time.

This novel was written in 1948, so women writers had made some strides by then, since Woolf's book was published in 1929. This just comes to show the inprovment made for women writers that that in just a short 20 years women were able to write more of what interested them rather than what they thought society would accept. Smith was able to push through the male dominated writing world and compose a piece of writing to be proud of.

Women in I Capture the Castle

While reading I Capture the Castle, I noticed that there was still a sense of women being degraded in that period of time, which I think is a couple years after Virginia Woolfe wrote A Room of One’s Own. (Hopefully you guys all read, so I’m not being a spoiler =]) One example I found was that Topaz’s only source of possible income was to model and get her picture taken. The only way she could get a decent income was to entertain men with the pictures that were taken of her. Another example of women not being able to achieve as much as men is Rose’s inability to even get a job. Rose’s only hope is to marry a well-off man. When she does meet a nice man, she ruins it by being too forward. I think that the way Rose acts feeds to the stereotype that women are just searching for a rich husband so that they do not have to work. The narrator, who is a female, even says that Rose “has no real talents at all” and Rose even seems to believe this herself. When the family figures out the possible income for the whole family, everyone is counted as nil except for Stephen. Stephen is the ex-maid’s son, who is not even part of the family. I thought that this really showed how helpless and useless the women in the family were.
Even though there is a sense of women being degraded, there is also a sense of change too. Cassandra, the narrator, said that she could potentially sell her writing for profit in the future. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf seems to say that it is very hard for women to gain income from their writing. Topaz also says that she needs “time for [her] own painting” that she might sell (18). This shows that a woman’s art can be taken seriously if she thinks that she can sell her own painting.

SA #14: "What White Publishers Won't Print"

Due W 11/25

1. In what ways is Hurston's style similar to that of Virginia Woolf?

2. Hurston begins her essay by arguing that white publishers don't publish stories about black people unless the black people are servants or menial laborers. Yet there is, she acknowledges "fiction built around upper-class Negroes" that "exploit[s] the race problem" (169). Why doesn't this fiction count as fiction about black people, according to Hurston?

Angry Writing?

During one of the office hours someone asked if there has ever been a book written in anger and taken seriously. Williams' Imaginations was brought up. I think there were lots of violent language and depictions used but I believe there were used in a controlled sense. He wasn't just lashing out, although it is quiet clear he was angry, the violent imagery is used for a purpose - that is to show the beauty of using one's imagination for recreating.

Another piece of literature that came to mind was Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Anger can be read almost on every page and yet we remember Paine for his powerful arguments against the injustices of a monarch. He was arguing for a cause just as much as Woolf was for hers. How do they differ?

I also became very curious about how anger disrupts "incandescent and unimpeded" writing. Are there other emotions that can do the same or is anger special in this way?

Race or Gender Equality - Which is more important?

I remember that while Hurston's "What White Publishers Won't Print" was published in 1950, Woolf's A Room of One's Own was published in the 1920s (pardon my laziness, but I don't want to dig out the book.) It also seems to me that the general public were more accepting of books written by women earlier than they started to accept those written by racial minorities. I guess an example is with a book that has survived with great fame that was written in the 30s: Gone With the Wind. Yet, I can't recall a book from that time written by a minority author. Could this show that in the literary world, the public equalized women writers quicker than they did minority writers.

But... in the constitution, race was equalized ~70 years before women...

a woman in fiction...literally

Hi everyone :)

I'd like to discuss something we talked about in class this past week about characters in fiction. In class we were talking about female characters in fiction. Something that really stuck me as interesting was when we were trying to figure out female characters whose role didn't revolve around a man and when we came up with Dorothy from the The Wizard of Oz, an idea was presented that her character was one that it wouldn't have mattered what gender she was. i thought it was really interesting how we were trying to find a woman that didn't fit that typical female role and when we finally found one, i felt that we found a way to discredit the fact that it was a female character. it seemed as though the fact that she was an independent character and didn't necessarily follow the female stereotype made her character less of a female character and more of a, i guess "unisex" character or gender neutral character. Personally, i thought that Dorothy was a pretty good example of a woman in fiction who is a main character and who's character does not revolve around a male character.

that discussion made me realize that even we, in the the 21st century, have not completely moved away from classifying woman in terms of specific gender characteristics.

Writers Anonymous

The discussion we had today about gender and writing and whether the author's sex makes a difference on the impact of the writing got me thinking. Whenever I choose a book to read the first thing I look at is the title of the book to get a sense of what the book might be about. Then I read the back cover or the inside covers of the book to get a brief summary. Unless the author is one that I obviously know well, I do not give a thought about the author's name. Likewise I don't go searching on Wikipedia for a biography of the author either. The point is it does not matter what kind of person the author is. It does not affect what I choose to read. I read for content, so when someone mentioned that if a male wrote Twilight it would be a different experience, I was surprised. But that's just me; I'm sure there are different opinions. I just do not believe in putting limits on what people can accomplish just because they are not expected to know certain things.

Women in Writing

In this blog, I'd like to compare the women of the 18th century to the women of the 19th century. Back then, we understand that women were silenced in the realm of writing and literature. To write as a women was the deviate from societal norms. Woolf points out that the women who did come out with writing back then did so in bravery. She gave proper acknowledgment to both Jane Austen and Emily Bronte in their bravery despite the struggles and criticism they had to endure. Women today do not have to go through this fear of criticism when publishing their books, more or less. We study women authors in school alongside men authors now. In my opinion, there is still a little ways to go in fully accepting women authors, though. As in our discussion today we were questioning Stephanie Meyer. We somewhat said that she fulfilled her gender role and wrote as a women, to women, in a womanly manner. We then questioned if it were to be a man writing the book that it would be preposterous. Why is that so? Is it because we split the two into categories only suitable for one and the other to then compare them in their gender roles? I don't think it's fair that it was said that she wrote well insider her gender role, but as in comparison to men was it comparable? If we even have to bring up these questions, I think it's fair to say that the equality of women and men in writing is not yet existent.

Twilight - author insane if he was male?

I'd like to continue our discussion about our favoritestest book, Twilight. During discussion today, we I said that if the book was to be written word-for-word the same way, except if the author was male, we would think that the author would be -- like women writers of the 17th+18th centuries -- crazy. This is very interesting because Twilight is undoubtedly a gender biased book, as in it is written for women, by a woman, on a topic that women would enjoy more than men. Well, why would we think a male author would be insane? I think it's because he is not conforming to the "social-gender standards," or the set of rules we expect a gender to behave accordingly to in a society.

Interestingly enough, that is the exact reason why women writers back then were characterized as crazy: they didn't conform to what was expected of them. It seems that even though our fiction has evolved so far on the basis of tolerance, we actually haven't gotten very far at all.

A Room of One's Own

I believe that what Virginia Woolf has to say about women in fiction is quite accurate for her time period. They did need some kind of financial support and some space in order to be a success or even be recognized in the writing community. It was very difficult for women to get their thoughts out into the public because men felt so superior towards them. Luckily this has changed and now women write just as much as men and have even written some of the more popular novels of today.
In Woolf's time period men felt that since they were the "better" sex they could make women feel inferior. Ina disccussion we had we talked about what made men think they had this ability in the first place. My thoughts on this is that it was how their father's and grandfathers acted, therefore it was the norm and they should act like that as well. Once they had women feeling of lesser value they had the ability to not allow them to be educated so that they could not get ahead of them in life.
Virginia Woolf talks about the women colleges that we being built and how they did not have enough funding, therefore they were once again inferior to those schools for only the men. This is just another example of why in that time period omen really did need a lot of money in order to start writing and be acknowledged as a writer as well. Women were not banded from writing, it was just that they would not be able to make an sufficient amount of money to live off of because no one would even think of buying a book written by a women. This is why many women would write their book using men's names so that people would actually consider buying the book.

Ten best books?

Apropos of A Room of One's Own, you all might be interested in recent controversy over a list of best books of 2009 put out by Publisher's Weekly -- an all-male-authored list. Why?

Lizzie Skurnik writes:

I got a glimmer of an answer last year as I sat in a board room hashing out the winners for one of the awards for which I am a judge. Our short list was pretty much split evenly along gender lines. But as we went through each category, a pattern emerged. Some books, it seemed, were "ambitious." Others were well-wrought, but somehow . . . "small." "Domestic." "Unam --" what's the word? "-- bititous."

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "ambitious," what I think is "Nice try. Better luck next time. Keep shooting for the stars!" I think many things, but never among them is the word Congratulations.

But, incredulous, again and again, I watched as we pushed aside works that everyone acknowledged were more finely wrought, were, in fact, competently wrought, for books that had shot high but fallen short. And every time the book that won was a man's.

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting." (I wasn't built for the board room.) "But we can't be doing it because we're sexist," an estimable colleague replied huffily. "After all, we're both men and women here."

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people -- male or female -- think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

A few more responses:

-Matthew Cheney

-Aaron Bady (of UC Berkeley)

You'll notice that both Cheney and Bady bring up the problem of objectivity. What, if any, degree of objectivity is possible in the act of evaluation? Can objectivity exist when there is social inequality?

Mangos to Mangos

Hi Everyone

I just wanted to comment on Arcy's game that we played on friday and how I found it to be interesting and fun. At first i thought there was no way she can turn apples to apples into something educational but she did and it gave me insight into how other people thought of some of Woolf's ideas. For example when group one was playing the adjective card was "influential" and Jimmy put down a quote about the women of previous generations not being into the business of making money. At first I was really confused as to why he thought it was influential but once he began to explain it I totally understood what he was trying to get at.

The game required you to go back into the text and defend your card even if it wasn't the best one there. I thought this was cool because you were forced to think outside of just your interpretation of the book and look for evidence and different connections. I had a lot of fun but also got to hear about other peoples ideas about important quotes, people, and things in the book. Another reason i found the game so interesting is the two piles of cards split the novel into concrete details and the words that sum up the important ideas in the novel.

Lady Winchilsea

In class we briefly discussed Lady Winchilsea’s writing about her feelings towards the position of women. We talked about how women are “fallen by mistaken rules”. It was mentioned that she calls these rules “mistaken” because the men are not purposely suppressing women but it just happened to be that way. I think another way to look at the “mistaken rules” is that she thinks the men are mistaken in thinking that they are more intelligent than women. So instead, women being suppressed did not just happen naturally, but man’s beliefs about women are mistaken. I also wanted to mention some other things that Lady Winchilsea writes that I thought were interesting.
She says that “the hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears” (58). She pretty much says that the fear of being rejected by society and/or criticized always prevents a woman from even trying to succeed. It is so weird to hear things like that now because a lot of women now are very successful and society now accepts, acknowledges, and sometimes praises women who are powerful. When she says this it also can seem like the women are too hard on themselves. It could be interpreted that the women are so fearful that they are too scared to risk anything.
She later says that “good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play are the accomplishments [women] should desire; to write, or read, or think or to enquire, would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time” (58). Do you guys think that these stereotypes still exist today? I surely feel that some of them still do. For example, many movies and shows still portray men as the sole provider of the family while the wives/mothers just take care of the kids and let the men boss them around.
Let me know your thoughts on what Lady Winchilsea wrote!

Equality for women?

One prediction of the narrator in A Room of One's Own is that "in a hundred years... women would cease to be the protected sex" (40). Is this really the case? Do women now have the same opportunity as men? I think not. Sure, in the workplace, there is an attempt to at least try to promote gender equality, but that is only one facet of it. Even in the workplace, there is evidence of gender inequality, such as lower pay for women. Broadening the scope to life in its entirety, I wonder, what would be necessary to create equal opportunities for men and women? I think that to do that, a complete overhaul of society would be necessary. But after that overhaul, if we did establish a society where men and women were equal, would it last? I don't think that it could.

People want safety. Self-preservation is one of the basic traits of animal nature. Having power means that one is safer, whether that safety manifests physically, or is just an illusion that calms the mind. Therefore, the grasp for power is part of nature. Unfortunately, it is impossible for one to be powerful without others being weak in relation. True, in the beginning of a hypothetically equal society, men and women would have the same opportunities, but as people claw for power, others will need to be pushed down. Gender and race lines are just make it easy to categorize people as they are being oppressed. Eventually, it becomes easier to oppress people by categories, and then one group must be left weak.

Letters today

Dorothy Osborne wrote in her letters that writing is not for women, ironically enough. However, she obviously didn't include her letter writing as regular writing, possibly because of the intended or the work she put into it.

Today, people write letters or emails all the time, but the line between talking and writing is rapidly becoming blurred especially with the advent of IM and Google Wave.

I wonder why there was such a distinction between men writing and women writing. Could it be that there are other activities chiefly done by men now that are "inappropriate" for women to do professionally, even though they do it in an amateur fashion all the time?