womanstudiesforwomen - Tumblr blog

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Men aren't "corrupted," when placed in positions of power or authority. They are enabled. The bad men in power didn't become bad because of power, they were always deplorable.

Power just lets them do it with little to no consequences. It didn't change who they were, it just made them feel like they'd get away with it. Terrible men will always be attracted to positions of authority.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Wanting to be thin, obsessing over weight and not getting enough food is one of the most important feminist issue of our age to tackle.

How can we be successful if we don't have enough energy? How can we think properly without enough fuel? How can we be active without enough strength? How can we fight without enough fitness? Enough muscle?

It's honestly terrifying how there are so many ways that males have crippled women effectively. Through years of indoctrination, women have been conditioned to mould themselves to be attractive to men.

Even though now many women don't have to be married to men, many women still have these artifical handcuffs in their brain.

The argument males gleefully make is that we men don't have standards, it's you dumb women forcing beauty standards on each other and they ignore the historic precedent and years of brainwashing.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

In 1847 the stereotypes for male and female writers were very rigid. Critics expected from a male writer strength, passion, and intellect, and from a woman writer they expected tact, refinement, and piety. They depended on these stereotypes so much, in fact, that they really didn't know how to proceed, what to say, or what to look for in a book if they were unsure of the author's sex.

So Jane Eyre created a tremendous sensation, and it was a problem for the Brontës. The name Currer Bell could be that of either a man or a woman and the narrator of Jane Eyre is Jane herself. The book is told as an autobiography. These things suggested that the author might have been a woman. On the other hand, the novel was considered to be excellent, strong, intelligent and, most of all, passionate. And therefore, the critics reasoned, it could not be written by a woman, and if it turned out that it was written by a woman, she had to be unnatural and perverted.

The reason for this is that the Victorians believed that decent women had no sexual feelings whatsoever—that they had sexual anesthesia. Therefore, when Jane says about Rochester that his touch "made her veins run fire, and her heart beat faster than she could count its throbs," the critics assumed this was a man writing about his sexual fantasies. If a woman was the author, then presumably she was writing from her own experience, and that was disgusting. In this case we can clearly see how women were not permitted the authority of their own experience if it happened to contradict the cultural stereotype.

But even more shocking than this to the Victorians was Jane's reply to Rochester, a very famous passage in the novel. He has told her he is going to marry another woman, an heiress, but that she can stay on as a servant. Jane answers him thus:

"I tell you I must go," I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton, a machine without feeling and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I'm soulless and heartless? You think wrong. I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should've made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionality, nor even of mortal flesh. It is my spirit that addresses your spirit, just as if both had passed through the grave and we stood at God's feet equal—as we are."

This splendid assertion violated not only the standards of sexual submission, which were believed to be women's duty and their punishment for Eve's crime, but it also went against standards of class submission, and obviously against religion. And this sort of rebellion was not feminine at all.

The reviews of Jane Eyre in 1847 and 1848 show how confused the critics were. Some of them said Currer Bell was a man. Some of them, including Thackeray, said a woman. One man, an American critic named Edgar Percy Whipple, said the Bells were a team, that Currer Bell was a woman who did the dainty parts of the book and brother Acton the rough parts. All kinds of circumstantial evidence were adduced to solve this problem, such as the details of housekeeping. Harriet Martineau said the book had to be the work of a woman or an upholsterer. And Lady Eastlake, who was a reviewer for one of the most prestigious journals, said it couldn't be a woman because no woman would dress her heroines in such outlandish clothes.

Eventually Charlotte Brontë revealed her identity, and then these attacks which had been general became personal. People introduced her as the author of a naughty book; they gossiped that she was Thackeray's mistress. They speculated on the causes of what they called "her alien and sour perspective on women." She felt during her entire short life that she was judged always on the basis of what was becoming in femininity and not as an artist.

-Elaine Showalter, ‘Women Writers and the Female Experience’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[womanstudiesforwomen]

“Clinical psychologist Dr. John Carta-Falsa pointed out that, when men discuss with one another their sexual relations with women, they are being (covertly) sexual with one another. I would add to his observation that, when men get together to talk about “fucking” women, “scoring”, or their sexual conquests, they are communicating to one another that, although they have sex with women, their emotional bonds are with one another. They are saying to their male companions, “You are more important to me than the woman with whom I had sex.” (Perhaps this is why the individual females with whom men have sex are not all that important to many of them.) They are also communicating that their sexual relations with women are for the purpose of exploitation. Such talk by men puts the male listeners in the sex act with the male speaker and the woman. The companions are invisible, but they are there with the man doing the “fucking”, sharing in his victory of the exploitation of a woman, the men’s bonds strengthened by the sharing, united in their subjugation of femaleness.”

— Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (x)

[womanstudiesforwomen]

In her book My Fight for Birth Control (1931) [Margaret Sanger] is quite clear about the fact that while birth control may have served economic ends, and while it was a practice consistent with her analysis of society, it was none the less a response to women's needs - and not to men's needs of a revolution - that induced her to take on the double task of finding out how pregnancies (and births) could be prevented, and then of distributing the knowledge to women. While today we may think that the greater problem is finding safe and satisfactory means of birth control, in Sanger's time the greater problem was providing women with the information of the means.

The law stated - in Sanger's own words - ‘that no one could give information to prevent conception to anyone for any reason’ (1931, p. 152). It was illegal to publish such information or to send such 'obscene' material through the post. Because of this 'conspiracy of silence', it is understandable that many women thought there was a ‘secret,’ known only to the privileged few. This was the case with Sadie Sacks, whose experience Margaret Sanger cites in her own account of her commitment to the struggle for birth control.

Mrs Sacks already had three young children when she became pregnant again, and because she could not afford another child, physically or financially, she procured an abortion and Margaret Sanger arrived as the nurse who afterwards battled for her life. The woman survived but was very despondent, informing Sanger that another baby would kill her (either through abortion or birth) and that she was desperate to find a way of preventing it. She asked the doctor what she should do and he treated the whole issue facetiously; he scoffed at the idea that she should want to have her cake and eat it too, and suggested that she ‘ban’ her husband to the rooftop. After the doctor's departure, Mrs Sacks implored Sanger to tell her the secret, and Sanger states with rage and frustration that she simply did not know how you prevented pregnancy.

Sanger too left Mrs Sacks's home and over the next few months felt uneasy - even guilty - about the fate of Mrs Sacks. Then she was called once more; this time Mrs Sacks died from the abortion. Sanger returned to her own home, stunned, but gradually convinced throughout the course of the night that ‘uncontrolled breeding’ was the central social problem and determined to do something about it. She writes that at that moment she renounced all palliative work for ever. ‘I would never go back again to nurse women's ailing bodies while their miseries were as vast as the stars. I was now finished with superficial cures, with doctors and nurses and social workers who were brought face to face with this overwhelming truth of women's needs and yet turned to pass on the other side. They must be made to see these facts. I resolved that women should have knowledge of contraception. They have every right to know about their own bodies … I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard. No matter what it should cost. I would be heard’ (ibid., p. 56).

In 1916, Sanger opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn - the main emphasis being on contraception, not abortion - and while it was designed to provide women with information it was also a deliberate attempt to test the law. News of the clinic quickly spread, women flocked to its doors, and poured out their feelings of terror and pain on this issue which haunted their lives but which was a socially and legally taboo topic. The premises were raided, the women arrested and Sanger says, ‘We were not surprised at being arrested, but the shock and horror of it was that a woman, with a squad of five plain clothes men, conducted the raid and made the arrest. A woman - the irony of it!’ (ibid., p. 158). There can be no doubt that Sanger saw women as a group, with shared interests and a common cause. There was panic among the women in the waiting room - who were being bullied by the police in the attempt to obtain their names so that they could later be subpoenad to testify - and there was chaos outside (women, baby carriages, children - all waiting to get into the clinic). When Sanger and Tania Mindell were taken away, one woman ran after them, screaming wildly for them to come back and help her. The clinic was closed; the court declared it a ‘public nuisance’. Sanger was imprisoned but went on to fight again - and again.

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

[womanstudiesforwomen]

[Christine de Pizan] began [The Book of the City of the Ladies] with a marvelous account of her own transformation of consciousness. Sitting in her study reading one of the many misogynist tracts of the day, she began to wonder "how it happened that so many different men. . . are so inclined to express . . . so many wicked insults about women . . . It seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth." She examined herself and her experience and could find no evidence to support the claims of these men. Yet, she bowed to the authority of the male experts. "And so I relied more on the judgement of others than on what I myself felt and knew." Here, for the first time in the written record, we have a woman defining the tension every thinking woman has experienced—between male authority denying her equality as a person and her own experience. Christine was deeply depressed by this recognition, when, as in a vision, three ladies appeared to her to comfort her and to bring her out of the ignorance which had blinded her intellect. Lady Reason explained to her that she had been selected to "vanquish from the world the same error into which you had fallen" and that she was entrusted with the task of building a city of ladies in which all valiant women might find refuge from attacks and slander. The other two ladies, Rectitude and Justice, would help her in this task. Awed and elated, Christine asked the three women to explain to her why men had so universally attacked and slandered women. The ladies offered various explanations: men were motivated by greed, envy, impotence and thwarted desire. The ensuing long dialogue with the three spiritual guides allowed Christine de Pizan to develop her historical argument and to illustrate by exempla the virtues of women.

This allegorical framework, which assumes that the patriarchal explanatory system is built on error, structures the book. It determines also the way in which she uses her sources. Where Boccaccio, with a few exceptions, followed a roughly chronological outline, Christine de Pizan arranged her list to follow a series of themes and arguments. She also used different criteria of selection. She wished to write a universal History of women and their achievements, therefore she included women of Antiquity, the Christian era and even her contemporaries. She reinterpreted the lives of the women on her list in a significant way, since her aim was different from that of Boccaccio, who simply wanted to prove that there had been illustrious women in Antiquity. Christine de Pizan wrote in defense of women against what she considered the misogynist attacks of men, and she wrote from an entirely woman-centered point of view. In revising Boccaccio's list therefore not only did she exclude all evil women, but she often reinterpreted the stories of women with a bad reputation so as to present them in a positive light. This is most obvious in her treatment of Medea, who is cited under the heading "The Faithfulness of Women in Love" without any reference to her murdering her children. Boccaccio's story of Medea abounds in condemnation of her treachery, her witchcraft, her cruelty. He described her murder of her brother, her theft of her father's wealth, her winning of Jason by sorcery and finally her murder of his children out of jealousy. Christine ignored all these crimes. Instead, she credited Medea with the wisdom and magic skill which she used to help Jason win the Golden Fleece on the condition that he would make her his wife and be faithful to her. "However, Jason lied about his promise, for after everything went just as he wanted, he left Medea, for another woman." At this, Christine tells us, Medea turned despondent, and thus she ends Medea's story. . . .

Neither Boccacio nor Christine could meet the standards of objectivity demanded of professional historians nearly 600 years later, and one cannot expect that they should. The changing of evidence to make a point or impart a didactic message was a well-established convention in the Middle Ages. What is remarkable is Christine's consistent insistence on her right, as a woman, to interpret the past from a point of view sympathetic to women, and her speaking as their advocate.

After questioning the truth of the historical tradition by pointing out the male bias of selection, Christine attempted to answer every commonplace prejudice voiced against women. Men had charged that women governed unwisely when they had power. Christine refuted this argument by citing a long list of exempla of women who governed wisely and well. She answered the charge of women's intellectual inferiority by citing a long list of women who excelled in learning, in poetry, in science and in philosophy. Here, as elsewhere, she freely mixed historical figures with allegorical and mythological persons. She also attempted to show female superiority in sensibility and caring by citing a long list of virtuous wives and mothers, chaste virgins and self-sacrificing women. All of this material evidence allegorically built the city of the ladies. When it was finished, the Queen of Heaven was invited to be its first inhabitant, attended by a large number of female saints.

Having thus completed the city, Christine dedicated it to "ladies from the past as well as from the present and future," urged all ladies to take refuge in it and to defend and guard it against enemies and assailants. She explicitly defined men "who accuse you of so many vices in everything" as the enemies and urged women to flee from male slanders and entrapment, "to cultivate virtue, to increase and multiply our City, and to rejoice and act well."

The allegorical city of the ladies, filled with heroines of worth and valor, represents the first consistent effort by a woman at constructing Women's History as a means of creating collective consciousness. Her attempt at creating a unifying ideology is deliberately broadly based; she speaks at various points of “all women—whether noble, bourgeois, or lower-class,” and even her seeming distinction between the virtuous and others is not to be taken too seriously since in her various lists she manages freely to include wicked and even sinful women. Her essential contribution was not only to attempt to rebut misogynist arguments by means of historical evidence but to insist that patriarchal generalizations and dicta would have to be evaluated and tested in light of the female experience, past and present. What Christine de Pizan had to offer to women was the insight that women must look to other women for their defense and that the collective past of women could be a source of strength to them in their struggle for justice.

-Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness

[womanstudiesforwomen]

also I’m starting to feel like “same face syndrome” IS a way of making headless/faceless woman art. our faces communicate our subjectivity. if every artistic representation of a woman has the same (beautiful, feminized) face, the implication is that they have no internal differences either. they might as well have no faces, because the faces they’re given are almost like … masks or placeholders in a way

[womanstudiesforwomen]

The problem is so many men think misogyny is a conscious choice of “I hate her because she’s a woman” like no

Misogyny is how you always have an excuse not to believe a woman

Misogyny is “I really don’t like her but I don’t know why”

Misogyny is how you always manage to take a man’s side

Misogyny is never listening to women

Misogyny is automatically feeling the need to test every woman to see if she’s really as smart as she says she is

[womanstudiesforwomen]

"separatists want women to give up their chance at love" the assumption here is that men can genuinely love women (rather than their usefulness). if men were out here loving women up there'd be no need for feminism in the first place. please stop avoiding the issue.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

I just saw a terrifying post about a father selling his 18 year old daughter to an older man in the middle east to be married for "culture reasons" (thankfully her step mom got her away but he is still trying to get her on the plane)

If this ever happens to you, if someone ever tries to traffic you to another country through at the airport,

>if you have forewarning call the local airport and tell them you will not be flying and to flag your passport if you come through

>if you won't be checked by the trafficker put a metal spoon in your underwear so you're flagged by tsa

>if you make it to security you will be instructed to take off your shoes and place your bag/items on the belt. When this is happening there will be metal detectors and guards all around you. This is the best time to blatantly say I AM BEING TRAFFICKED/ FORCED ON THIS FLIGHT I NEED HELP

>if you can find a bathroom and are alone the trafficking numbers are located in the stalls or on the walls usually. Call them and they will help you

>if there's an attendant call button in the bathroom you can also use that and then tell someone

You are worth more than marriage. You are worth more than your parents expectations. You owe your family nothing.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Her name is Bodhana Sivanandan!

The figure was the highest rating for a player under 9 in the world. She was also the only girl in the top 10, the highest rated 8-year-old girl in the history of chess, and the third highest of any sex all time, according to Chess.com.

While Sivanandan is set to become one of the youngest participants in the 2024 Chess Olympiad, she won't be the youngest ever. In 2022, eight-year-old Randa Sedar played for Palestine. Other youngsters have also played for smaller nations.

This is Randa Sedar. I wish only the best for these two tiny champions.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

What I need OSA women to know is that when men say shit like “Yeah I’d love to have kids someday” that’s like the equivalent of them saying “Yeah I’d love to go skydiving someday” in response to an inconsequential surface-level question that’s being asked on a first date. They’ve very likely given both hypothetical scenarios the same level of thought and planning, which is absolutely none. So when you hear them saying “I’d love to have kids someday,” just know that it’s most probably NOT them saying:

“I want to be an active father and this is something I’m dedicated to committing myself to for at least 18 years (and very likely more)”

“I want to equally and equitably share as much of the child-rearing and household labor with you as possible without being asked”

“I want to be a reliable crutch for you while you’re going through one of the most physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing times of your life” etc etc etc

It’s much more likely that what they’re actually saying is:

“I’d love for a woman, any woman, to have my children someday so that I can acquire the social clout and capital that claiming fatherhood would give me while also not having put in any extra effort to raise said children or even change my lifestyle one bit. Oh and that’s all so I can continue my non-existent legacy btw”

[womanstudiesforwomen]

something that is a big concern to me is women's issues in rural areas. I live in a rural area. and it's not even that rural. there are many communities near me that are very very small, less than 1000, less than 500. and how do these women get help if they need it? If you live on an island with less than 50 people on it, and your husband is beating on you every night, and everyone in town loves him, and people know what's happening but are looking away, what do you do? If you're pregnant, and the nearest hospital with an OB/GYN is more than a few hours away from you? If you are raped? If you need an abortion? If you just need emotional support from other women? I don't even know what issues these women face. but I so worry about them. I so worry about girls growing up in these places, so vulnerable to exploitation, if they went missing, who would notice or care? Who could even do anything about it? Lots of feminist research and activism is based around women living in cities or near cities. But what about women in villages and rural townships? I don't know but I need to do something to make sure they are okay.

A woman was shot in the head by her ex-husband in my town not too long ago. And it honestly barely made the news and nobody ever talked about what it all meant. And outside here, people really idealize villages and small town life and island life and act like it's so beautiful and idyllic. And I just shudder to think of the secrets these places are hiding. People love to sensationalize and romanticize places like this and it's like. People really live here and there are women here and they really have very few choices and very limited freedom. When you live in a small town, everyone knows you and you are being watched all the time. There is no anonymity like in a city or even a suburb. You have to play the part you're born into or else. And each little community is so peculiar and particular that you can't generalize about the dynamics; they're all a bit different. I don't know what to do! All the women here have such sadness on their faces. They are overburdened and I see it in the way they walk and hear it in their voices. I could leave, easily. I have had several opportunities to leave. But I just can't. I am always drawn back. This is my home. I want to help, I want to help. But what can I do?

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Separatism is wonderful and amazing and viable for every woman

[womanstudiesforwomen]

i frequent teacher Reddit and teacher TikTok and i just saw this horrifying TikTok from a woman saying her pregnancy was ended by a first grader and what’s even more disturbing is that other teachers in the comments seconded the fact their pregnancy was ended by a student hitting/kicking/punching/running into their stomach while it was known they were pregnant, and also that they felt they had to hide their pregnancy until it was impossible to because they knew they had a violent child in their elementary school class who would target this about them if they happened to become upset because they were very violent and psychopathic.

Honestly we don’t talk enough about the violence in many forms that women teachers experience from students and often specifically male students. Also that hitting, kicking, punching, or in any way targeting a woman’s stomach while she is pregnant is reproductive violence against women, and this is something that CANNOT happen to men or men cannot be targeted for.

Men can say oh a kid kicked me in the nuts is that not targeting me for being a man. And in my opinion the answer is no because that’s just targeted towards trying to be the most painful to the person and it happens that that’s where it is for a man, and while it is physical abuse it’s not reproductive targeting or abuse.

And also not only is the woman not pregnant anymore, it’s not like the fetus just reabsorbs and is gone, it likely sends this woman to the hospital and causes her to have a miscarriage, which most if not all miscarriages are deeply traumatizing and disturbing, not to mention they can be very painful if you are further along in your pregnancy.

I may not want to be a mother, but i will always speak up for and defend mothers.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Hello there!! Just wanted to ask : on that post about the woman with the infected nail, feminity etc. what do you mean about calluses?like calluses where and why. I don't understand it. Thank you in advance :-)

Hi :) I was referring to calluses mainly on our hands and feet. You get them by walking barefoot and doing manual labor. You probably got them on the playground as a kid if you did the monkey bars.

Calluses are seen as something to be "fixed" on a woman. There are plenty of products and advertisements to remove them and give you hands and feet as soft as a baby's bottom. Women are rarely shown with anything less than smooth skin. Many believe it's healthy to have soft skin, seeing moisturizing as "self care".

This is male propaganda. Your hands and feet don't naturally look like this if you do frequent physical work. Calluses are useful and healthy and they exist because our bodies know what they're doing. By removing calluses your body has built up through repetitive labor, you are handicapping yourself. Having calluses is the difference between people who spend all day indoors and get cut by a small rock when they step outside and people who can go for a hike without shoes or chop wood without gloves. You will need less gear/accomodations to move about in the world and you will have less pain with calluses.

"Indirect evidence suggests that footwear emerged as recently as ~30 000 years ago" (Source) For context, humans have been around for about 300,000 years, meaning that for the first 90% of our existence, we didn't have any more foot protection than any other animal. The idea that nature is hostile to us is propagated by our alienation from her.

If you've had a dog, you might've seen this. A dog that lives its life only indoors and in a grassy backyard has soft paws like the picture on the left:

Dogs that go for daily walks have feet that look like the picture on the right. Dog's paw pads are just skin, like ours, and can range from very poor protection to very high protection.

Any removal of calluses, which men are certainly not pressured to do, is almost always for the sake of appearing feminine.

Moral of the story being that all parts of femininity make you weak. Even the "healthy" parts. If you ask a lot of your body and push it, you will grow muscle and thick skin and adapt. Ask very little of your body and that is all it will be capable of.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

lamujermorena on tiktok