#early feminism

[retromere]

most daring thing about katherine hepburn? her pants

[thatstudyblrontea]

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

[haggishlyhagging]

“Miriam Kramnick (1978) is one of the few commentators on Wollstonecraft who outlines the nature of the ridicule she was subjected to and the significance of this form of sexual harassment. Wollstonecraft was the recipient of 'barely printable insults', states Kramnick. ‘Her own contemporaries called her a shameless wanton, a "hyena in petticoats", a "philosophizing serpent" or wrote jibing epigrams in the Anti-Jacobin Review, like

For Mary verily would wear the breeches

God help poor silly men for such usurping b…..s

Twentieth-century readers have called her an archetypal castrating female, "God's angry woman", a man hater whose feminist crusade was inspired by nothing more than a hopeless, incurable affliction — penis envy’ (ibid., p. 7).

Even feminists have been careful about associating with her and: ‘The name "Wollstonecraft", once considered synonymous with the destruction of all sacred virtues, disowned by the feminist movement as it marched for votes or pressed for admission to universities, became an obscure reference indeed’ (ibid., p. 8). When women sought to convince men that they were honourable, respectable, and deserving of equal representation in the institutions men had created for themselves, there was little room for Wollstonecraft, who had challenged those institutions and who had gained a ‘reputation.’

Like many of the reviews of Aphra Behn, some of the reviews of Wollstonecraft's work and life, on her death, were vicious. Her work should be read, declared the Historical Magazine (1799), ‘with disgust by any female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion’ (vol. I, p. 34). This was about as far as critics could go in the pre-Freudian days, but once he had made his priceless contribution, the attack on women who did not conform to the precepts dictated by men assumed a new and greater ferocity.

‘Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type,' argue Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham (1959) in Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism, which was to express the feelings of so many women in years to come. Unconsciously ... Mary and the feminists wanted ... to turn on men and injure them.... Underneath her aggressive writings, Mary was a masochist like her mother, as indeed all the leading feminist theorists were in fact.... By behaving as she did Mary indicated.... that she was unconsciously seeking to deprive the male of his power, to castrate him. It came out in her round scolding of men. The feminists have ever since symbolically slain their fathers by verbally consigning all men to perdition as monsters' (pp. 159-61). Really?

With the framework formulated by Freud, it again became easy to ridicule and harass women who developed any analysis of patriarchy, to dismiss them without having to refute their ideas. The scientific dogma took over from the religious dogma which had been seriously discredited (by women like Wollstonecraft) and both these male-decreed belief systems have been used ruthlessly against individual women and against women collectively. In her own day Mary Wollstonecraft was maligned for her moral sickness; with the advent of Freud it was her mental sickness. The principle is the same and it was a principle that Wollstonecraft herself identified and discredited - the principle that if women do not cheerfully confine themselves to the place to which men have relegated them, then there is something wrong with the women rather than the place they are expected to occupy. Mary Wollstonecraft understood that women would continue to be perceived as abnormal while the limited experience of men was treated as the sum total of human experience. One of her main protests was that men did not know how the world looked to women and, while they insisted that it looked no different from the way it looked to men, women were without space to discuss, share and confirm their feelings and ideas. And in this, Wollstonecraft is one of a long line of women who have come to understand the significance of male power to name the world and to say what is and what is not important, valuable, and ‘logical’.”

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[agentfascinateur]

Haiti gained independence in 1804 after "the first successful large-scale revolt by enslaved people in history", becoming the first free black republic.

Women had key roles in the fight for Haiti's independence including Sanité Bélair, Cécile Fatiman, Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniére, Catherine Flon, Suzanne Simone Baptiste Louverture and more.

#keep surviving

[womensharpoon]

The next stage

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

Woman, Race, and Class Ch. 2

“As they worked within the abolitionist movement, white women learned about the nature of human oppression — and in the process, also learned important lessons about their own subjugation. In asserting their right to oppose slavery, they protested — sometimes overtly, sometimes implicitly — their own exclusion from the political arena. If they did not yet know how to present their own grievances collectively, at least they could plead the cause of a people who were also oppressed.

The anti-slavery movement offered women of the middle class the opportunity to prove their worth according to standards that were not tied to their role as wives and mothers. In this sense, the abolitionist campaign was a home where they could be valued for their concrete works. Indeed, their political involvement in the battle against slavery may have been as intense, as passionate and as total as it was because they were experiencing an exciting alternative to their domestic lives. And they were resisting an oppression which bore a certain resemblance to their own. Furthermore, they learned how to challenge male supremacy within the anti-slavery movement. They discovered that sexism, which seemed unalterable inside their marriages, could be questioned and fought in the arena of political struggle. Yes, white women would be called upon to defend fiercely their rights as women in order to fight for the emancipation of Black people.

As Eleanor Flexner’s outstanding study of the women’s movement reveals, women abolitionists accumulated invaluable political experiences, without which they could not have effectively organized the campaign for women’s rights more than a decade later. Women developed fund-raising skills, they learned how to distribute literature, how to call meetings — and some of them even became strong public speakers. Most important of all, they became efficient in the use of the petition, which would become the central tactical weapon of the women’s rights campaign. As they petitioned against slavery, women were compelled simultaneously to champion their own right to engage in political work. 

....The above passage is also an illustration of the Grimke sisters’ insistence that white women in the North and South acknowledge the special bond linking them with Black women who suffered the pain of slavery. Again:

They are our country women — they are our sisters; and to us, as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue.

The question of equality for women,” as Eleanor Flexner put it, was not “a matter of abstract justice” for the Grimkes, “but of enabling women to join in an urgent task.” Since the abolition of slavery was the most pressing political necessity of the times, they urged women to join in that struggle with the understanding that their own oppression was nurtured and perpetuated by the continued existence of the slave system. Because the Grimke sisters had such a profound consciousness of the inseparability of the fight for Black Liberation and the fight for Women’s Liberation, they were never caught in the ideological snare of insisting that one struggle was absolutely more important than the other. They recognized the dialectical character of the relationship between the two causes.

More than any other women in the campaign against slavery, the Grimkes urged the constant inclusion of the issue of women’s rights. At the same time they argued that women could never achieve their freedom independently of Black people. “I want to be identified with the Negro,” said Angelina to a convention of patriotic women supporting the Civil War effort in 1863. “Until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.” Prudence Crandall had risked her life in defense of Black children’s right to education. If her stand contained a promise of a fruitful and powerful alliance, bringing Black people and women together in order to realize their common dream of liberation, then the analysis presented by Sarah and Angelina Grimke was the most profound and most moving theoretical expression of that promise of unity.

[muppetminge]

gd i get so fucking angry when i see crying about "boys are doing worse in school :(" being pulled up to look like a huge problem. you're not upset about boys doing 'badly' - you're upset about girls doing well. blaming it on the school system is so funny because tell me how the school system is suddenly modelled after the girls when we weren't even allowed in when the basis of the current system was being created lmao.

the difference between average grade by sex is about the same as the regional/geographic difference and it's less than the difference sorted by race/ethnicity (not even to mention the socioeconomic differences), yet these aren't the differences creating headlines every year. why?

because you find girls doing well wrong, like it's upsetting the natural order. you're hanging on to this idea that girls are stupid, yet when you're proved wrong you refuse to accept it, hanging on to an excuse of systematic differences that have to be solved now, because won't somebody please think of the poor boys :(

so we're looking at averages. here's the thing: those are never going to level out. we're always going to see one group being above/below others. you're just upset it's not in the "right" order.

the difference is smaller than you'd think, by the way. when i was in high school (non-us system, meaning voluntary/different kinds of secondary) we were 70 percent women. you know what else? the girls, in general, were working fucking hard. every single grade point they fucking earned. there's this story of girls' grades being inflated due to this and that, but all i've seen is boys getting grades for doing less - because they're outnumbered, the poor things, so it's obviously the teacher's job to support them, right? right??

even in trade school where we were a handful of girls per year, i saw nothing but the girls putting in their all and the boys showing up. sometimes. if they felt like it.

but it's a systemic problem, right? how else would girls be doing well? we've got to solve this, lest the boys get their egoes wounded by not placing in their 'natural' position. gd forbid we end up with an overweight of women professionals.

[welcometogrouchland]

I love Steph's origin as told in the Secret Origins 80 page giant- I just overall think it strengthens her character by giving her a lot of pathos and adding to her heroism (which isn't something writers were focused on in her actual intro in detective comics #647 since she was just meant to act as a plot device back then) BUT there is one tiny detail in it i will begrudge, and that is the portrayal of her having a minor love at first sight moment for tim

Secret origins 80 page giant, ID in alt

(or well, technically this was their second meeting in that story (the brick was the first) so...love at second sight?)

Mostly because Stephanie showed no interest in her introduction and only showed romantic feelings towards Tim AFTER this moment here:

Robin (1993) #4, ID in alt

Straight up the progression here goes:

The adventure in 'tec where they first meet -> Tim investigating the same crime scene as Steph -> she beats him up not knowing it's him at first, apologizes but says he shouldn't have scared her -> he remembers her/the moniker she goes by -> they talk about plot for a few pages -> Stephanie starts flirting

Robin (1993) #4, ID in alt

Which...is so fascinating to me and says so much about Stephanie. She highlights the fact that Tim "remembered" her. Like. Steph. Girl. This is our bar? It's sweet but kind of speaks to how much Stephanie is ignored at home/how little and sporadically she's shown interacting with her peers (and rarely ever the same kids twice). Her idea of peak romance is just...being on someone's mind even when you're not there.

Kind of also adds layers to Steph's proclivity towards jealousy later on, a manifestation of her insecurity and loneliness (though don't get it twisted, she's not written this way bc Dixon and co think it's an interesting character flaw, they wrote it bc they think it's an inherent character flaw of (particularly young) women/girls, which is very apparent in how he approaches Ariana's character as well from what I've read)

Also the fact that Steph becomes so smitten for Tim almost immediately after this is (a few issues later she aggressively flirts with him during AN ACTIVE HOSTAGE SITUATION. WHERE SHE'S THE HOSTAGE) again is kind of a mixture of kind of funny and sad. One boy is nice to her once and she's fully ready to wife him. Girl you are deranged (affectionate) (concerned)

[thatstudyblrontea]

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides', and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

[haggishlyhagging]

To [Catherine] Macaulay, femininity was a social construct, a state to be worked for and attained, and while it might be in the interest of men to have docile, delicate and dim women, this arrangement certainly had little to recommend itself to women. She examines the attributes that are found desirable in women - particularly as they relate to beauty - and declares them to be the product of men's minds projected onto women's minds - and bodies - and which demand that women distort themselves in order to be desirable. While Macaulay's terminology may be different from that used today, her meanings are not far removed from many of our own.

Making one of the links made by Mary Daly (1978) in Gyn/Ecology, Macaulay refers to the then current practice of confining girls' feet in tight shoes and says ‘if littleness alone ... constitutes the beauty of feet, we can never pretend to vie with the Chinese, whilst we presume the privilege of walking’ (1790, p. 44) and she emphasises the way women are required to disfigure themselves in the effort to become attractive to men. She also comments on why men may find such disfigurement and deformity ‘attractive’: it enhances their images of themselves as strong, intelligent and superior. The attempt to appear small, delicate, fragile, and foolish, put upon women to promote the superiority of men, leads women to engage in the most appalling practices, states Macaulay. They are ‘obliged to lisp with their tongues, to totter in their walk, and to counterfeit more weakness and sickness than they really have, in order to attract the notice of the male’, and, echoing the words of Mary Astell of almost one hundred years before, says that men admire excellence, but love those they despise. So much for ‘romance’; she has few illusions about the relationship between the sexes.

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[horsedisk]

There are good faith people who say things like “the meaning of the word ‘proship’ is so muddled” and “no one can decide what proship means” but I need the internet to understand the word proship has only ever meant pro(for) ship(shipping).

Like…“for shipping.” As in, “in favor of shipping.” As in, “let people ship whatever they like.”

Over time the definition of proship has expanded to “let people enjoy whatever fiction they like” which means the same thing.

How much more clear cut can you get?

The anti campaign to rebrand pro(for) as pro(problematic), or to equate “proship” to “people who ship illegal things” (???) and “people who ship incest and pedophilia” ≠ the term “proship” is “muddled” or that proshippers can’t make up our minds. It just means antis have shoveled around enough horseshit to irradiate the term. How many of these “no one can give you a consistent definition” people actually mean “I don’t want to use this term because it will mark me as a chronically online loser at best or a child predator at worst?” Like, please realize that’s not OUR fault as proshippers. Proshippers didn’t spread the misinformation. We weren’t the ones who turned a stance as normal as “let people ship whatever they like” or “let people enjoy whatever fiction they like” into a social death knell. You’re allowed to not use the term of course, but like. Can you please not kick the people who do use the term while we’re down? We’ve only ever wanted to play with our dolls and pay our taxes and mind our own business.

[simpingforcys]

Me @ King Candy, I CAN FIX HIM probably not JUST ONE CHANCE, PLEASE JUST ONE JUST A SINGLE ONE

[kacievvbbbb]

Maybe it's just me and I just don't understand the arc. Or maybe this arc will get some grand conclusion I'm really starting to doubt. But like I'm sick and tired of Tashigi being used as Zoro's misogyny proxy. Like the "a woman swordsman could never beat a man" belief and trauma made sense for both Kuina and Tashigi and was a very valid fear way back in the East Blue when they were still fighting relatively normal people and had no scope of how big the world is

but at this point where there are literally 20 feet tall dudes and people can blow up a whole city with just Haki the only reason Tashigi is still weak is because she is being written that way. Which is really hard to understand because it seems now more than ever One Piece has been getting more and more strong female characters so I don't know why every time Tashigi is on screen with Zoro we have to rehash this. It's even worse cause all she does in the scene is prove Zoro right by getting in a fight that she can't handle and needing saving. It's such a confusing message and honestly doesn't really apply or come up anywhere but with Tashigi and Zoro (outside of that one time where Zoro yells at enel for blasting Robin because she's a woman which was weird because Robin's been in a lot of fights before but seemed there just so enel could point out just how ruthless it is.)

Hell with the exception of the G5 all being in love with her. She is treated like a regular character and not just "the woman"

It honestly feels like both Tashigi and Smoker got lost in the narrative and Oda just doesn't know where to put their arcs. It feels like she was being written to help Zoro overcome whatever mental block Kuina's death instilled in him about facing female opponents with his sword. But she is just sooooo far behind him it renders the point moot and strengthens his convictions (it's weird that he will literally crush a woman's face rather than use his sword and is the only reason I won't say he doesn't fight women he does he just seems to have a mental block about cutting them down especially if they fight with anything blade like) but also we've only ever seen him face female character he knows can't challenge him it would have been interesting to see what he'd do in a fight against someone like big mom, tsuru or smoothie doubt that will happen though. But here's to hoping for Tashigi to have an actual arc.

[womensharpoon]

More autobiography

...I've rambled here about my art series. I haven't written much more about my life, but there is so much more, so here I go again. I left off in my teens, circa 1965, wandering New York, sneaking off from my suburban New Jersey home to explore and wonder and wander. Finally I graduated high school. My mother scored me a job in Monticello, NJ, at Swinging Bridge Lodge. It was a fabulous summer, I had my first sex, my first love, my days were filled with waiting tables and learning how to water ski from beautiful boys who wanted into my pants, my nights bartending (I was only 17 but everyone ignored that). My hair pulled up, a fake braid down my back, strumming my guitar, sitting behind the bar, cigarette dangling from my lips, wailing out Buffy St Marie and Joan Baez, life was sweet. It was then, one glowing evening sitting on the back porch of the Marina Restaurant, listening to Phil and Fanny Hype, the owners, chatter from the kitchen, gazing out across the lake, I visualized myself in my 80's, looking back at a life filled with adventures, telling my tales, and I knew between now and then I had to fulfill that self-prophecy...live my life to its fullest; grab every token, follow every path that presented itself, never let an opportunity go by. That was the real beginning, the intent to life my life to its fullest.

The summer passed. I returned to my NJ suburban home. I already had sculptures and drawings in a gallery in Englewood, the only artist showing, but Sharon Cohen, the owner, was so supportive she had somehow convinced my parents to let me pursue my studies at the University of Hartford Art School. It was a disaster. I didn't know how to be a student, I didn't follow the rules, I didn't understand or even know the rules and my fuck-it-all attitude annoyed the professors. The following summer, counselling at some Jewish sleep-away camp in upstate New York, teaching little people how to water ski, I met a girl who talked me into quitting school and getting a job at Columbia U. I just did it. The next day I was driving back home, I shucked the camp, college, and other people's ideas of what I should be doing with my life and slid out of it like an old, ratty, worn-out coat. I started commuting to my job at Low Library at Columbia on 116th St in NY, renovated my brother's unused bedroom into an art studio, got a bunch of drawings accepted at the Marissa del Rey Gallery on Madison Avenue, and my new life was underway.

Life slid into perfection. The 60's in New York was filled with civil disobedience, marches and sit-ins against the Vietnam war spilled out from Low Library onto the campus. I started seeing a boy who edited an underground newspaper filled with anarchy and insurrection, his tiny apartment in the Village smelled of Brussel Sprouts and cat litter and pot. Coming home at 2am stinking of Mary J, stoned out of my mind, sitting at the piano, composing and flying high. Commuting daily to my mindless job, weekends painting, drawing, exploring art, showings at my 2 galleries.

Mom decided I was drifting. Hear this voice, slightly Jewish NY accent, saying "Hally, you need something to fall back on. I signed you up for Katherine Gibbs. Go, you need a real job." Mothers. Can't live with them, can't be born without them. What could I do? I didn't have an alternative, the ultimate was given. My brother was living in Englewood with his friend, Dan Hennessey (yeah, he wasn't born in Toronto, he was born in Demarest, NJ -- Hi Dan, give me a call sometime) but he wouldn't let me move in, so I was trapped.

So I learned typing and shorthand. I hated every minute of it until I met Cheryl Vernon. Kindred spirit, gorgeous face with a marring split lip, we wore huge hats (hats were a must have at Katie Gibbs), white kid gloves that turned black from subway soot, heals under 2", skirts below your knees. It's 1968. Beatles, Donovan, folk rock. At the end of class every day we put our shoes and hats in our lockers, we rolled up the waists of our skirts to show our thighs, we put on our hip-high white patent leather boots that were definitely meant for walking, see-through shirts, chocolate Nat Sherman's delicately held to our glossy painted lips, we sauntered down Fifth Avenue with the rest of the girlie brigade.

[pisshandkerchief]

the obvious double standard with which we as a society treat amab nonbinary people and trans women who don't fit the level of feminity that they're expected to is actually disgusting.

[colebabey888]

I will be uploading a post on how to become an academic weapon whilst being a pretty pink diva relating to the Elle Woods method

In the meantime, practice your bend and snap ladies!

The legally blonde marathon has always been my go to movies, since I can remember. It was Elle Woods who gave me my love for the pink aesthetic and aspiration for academic excellence. Not to mention, the highlight in the movies on learning your self worth and not allowing men to be the judge of your intelligence nor your path in life or the key to opportunities life has to offer us girlies.

The Elle Woods method can be a big help to many girl's growing in their superior femininity while tackling their education..

What, like it's hard ? - Elle Woods🩷

mwah! xoxo, colebabey8.88