For October 8th

Administrative Stuff
• As a reminder: Given the technological difficulties that we’ve had with the Blackboard Dropbox, we won’t be using it anymore this semester. From now on, with the exception of your Discussion Questions, please submit all your work in hard copy by the beginning of class on the date that it’s due. My hope is that this will eliminate any confusion and anxiety about whether I’ve received your assignments or not. The only exception to this is the Discussion Questions, which should be submitted to me via e-mail by 5 PM on Thursday evening the day before we’re scheduled to discuss your readings.
• Please start thinking about when you’d like to meet with me about your Term Project. Meeting with me is a requirement of the assignment, so don’t let that slip by. Of course, I’d love to talk to you about your project as many times as you’d like, but we’ve got to have at least one conversation in which you come prepared as described in the Term Project assignment sheet.
• On that note, if you have any questions or concerns at any point about anything this semester, please don’t hesitate to stop by to chat during my office hours or, alternatively, e-mail me to arrange an appointment.

After Suffrage – Identifying Oppressions; Imagining Liberation
You will notice of your readings this week that, historically speaking, we’ve skipped about a half century. This isn’t because there was no feminist activity happening between the achievement of women’s suffrage after World War I and the start of the WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT (WLM) in the late 1960s, but because, for the most part, the 1920s and 1950s constituted a period of backlash with regard to the status of women.

As you read in Jenainti and Groves, during the period immediately following World War I, women in Western Europe and North America were thanked for their war-time service and support via the granting of suffrage, but were told quite soundly to “return” home and start making babies to replace the overwhelming numbers of (male) soldiers killed on the battlefields of Europe. So, just when women were first entering and graduating from universities and gaining ground in terms of their political, social, and economic status, everything was put on hold so that society could supposedly return to its pre-war status quo.

But university-educated feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf kept up the good fight by questioning the status of women (J&G, pp.79-84).

At the same time, feminist activists from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and South America, along with a few from Western Europe and North America (especially women of colour and working-class women), joined social justice organizations such as anti-war/peace groups and/or socialist groups that weren’t necessarily explicitly woman-centred, but included gender justice as part of their broad political agendas.

These groups were just starting to make some headway at national and international levels when this guy named Hitler started wreaking havoc all over Europe, and the international focus became all about halting fascism. So, just like World War I, World War II effectively put a stop to feminist and other sorts of social justice organizing, because the lives of soldiers and saving the world for democracy quite understandably took precedence over thinking about the causes and consequences of the existence of a “second sex” (de Beauvoir) or ensuring that a woman had “a room of [her] own” (Woolf).

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Virginia Woolf - A Room Of One's Own
Uploaded by poetictouch. - Independent web videos.
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And in the aftermath of World War II, just like after World War I, women were encouraged to “return” home to fulfill their “natural” roles as wives and mothers, thus ushering in the allegedly idyllic 1950s that was depicted on television shows like Donna Reed and Leave It to Beaver.

You probably have read or heard, though, about how the notion of “returning” to “natural” gender roles within the patriarchal nuclear family was actually neither a “return” nor “natural.” The large majority of women in the world have always worked for wages outside the home, and feminist historians have argued that this statistical reality has been made invisible by the rhetoric of how “perfect” the 1950s was. But, of course, this “perfection” could only be achieved by families with a husband/father whose salary was high enough to provide for an entire family. The narrative of the alleged “perfection” of the 1950s is, consequently, not only sexist, but also classist and racist, as well.

The gay liberation, civil rights, and student movements during the 1960s were, in part, a reaction to the 1950s, and SECOND WAVE FEMINISM grew out of these movements. Large numbers of women were involved in each of these movements, but they began realizing a couple of things: (1) That they were often relegated to “assistant” or “secretarial” sorts of jobs within the movements, and (2) that the movements themselves, despite claims to the contrary, often ignored the concerns of women. Check out this short video about the WLM in the U.S. The posts at the end are particularly illuminating in their clear manifestation of sexism bordering on misogyny.

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This is the history that lies at the foundation of this next section of our course, After Suffrage – Identifying Oppressions; Imagining Liberation. Our reading for Friday’s class is meant to serve as an introduction to the sorts of issues that feminist theorists since the late 1960s have been concerned with, and the accompanying Worksheet asks you to focus quite closely on the arguments that each theorist is making. As you’re reading, then, consider the following questions:

1. What oppression(s) have each of these theorists identified, and why?
2. What sort of liberation do they envision?

Some Fun Info
One of our authors this week, Wangari Maathai, is a Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work the the Green Belt Movement, which, as early as the 1970s focused on environmental sustainability as a feminist/social justice issue.
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