Tuesday, April 27, 2010

My Initial Thoughts on the State of Women

There is nothing inherently masculine or feminine in an individual, but from a very young age females and males act very differently; we are what our society tells us to be. In America many women come to believe that marriage and children are very important parts of being a woman, which makes perfect sense when one looks at marriage in terms of capitalism. The capitalist has far more control over the worker with a wife and child at home, than a single man who can make demands a nd risk being fired. Marriage and propagation has traditionally been a very important component of organized religions, but socially speaking religion does not have the power it used to. Now companies through advertisement, television, and all other outlets of everyday culture show a propensity for the married over the single man or woman. In popular culture there is always something wrong with a woman who is unable to “keep” or “find” a man, she is never willingly single and often desperate.
The mass dissemination of a world created by the capitalist is something to fear. The capitalistic ideal quickly becomes our desires in the everyday, and all are at risk of being consumed. “Man’s vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be and what he fears her to be, and it is to this mirror image that woman has had to comply… [A] woman is taught to desire not what her mother desired for herself, but what her father and all men find desirable in a woman. Not what she is, but should be” (Figes 17). Only in the last few hundred years with emergence of Puritanism and a modern industrialized west has the woman become particularly marginalized:

"The men who defended what they considered to be their inalienable rights with such vigor and conviction during the last century where not aware that some of these privileges were in fact of comparatively recent date, and that the sharp division of roles […] was a comparatively recent development. It is often argued that female discontent with her womanly lot ill becomes her, and that when a woman accepts her subjection gracefully both he and man are much happier for it" (Figes 67).



Works Cited

Figes, Eva. Patriarchal Attitudes Women in Society. New York: Persea, 1987. Print.

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