{"id":265,"date":"2008-10-18T20:58:22","date_gmt":"2008-10-19T00:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/?p=265"},"modified":"2008-10-18T20:58:22","modified_gmt":"2008-10-19T00:58:22","slug":"265","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/archives\/265","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Can it be considered\u00a0a feminist book?\u00a0I do think there is a certain amount of satire in the way\u00a0Joanna Russ\u00a0is writing this, which may be an attempt to produce some resistance to notions about women especially considering the date when it was written, but I’m not sure.\u00a0 I mean, I still haven’t figured out what I really think about House of Leaves <\/em>just because there was so much to it, but I’m hoping that the Female Man<\/em> will be a little easier to tackle.<\/p>\n

So on the drive home after class on Thursday I was listening to NPR, which makes me a nerd first of all, but also fairly up to speed on news I would like to think.\u00a0 They had a story on “All Things Considered” about Margaret Chase Smith<\/a>\u00a0who was the first woman from a major political party to run for president.\u00a0 (The first woman was actually Victoria (Clafin) Woodhull<\/a>\u00a0in 1872.)\u00a0 It was strange to listen to this story about a woman running in 1964 for the Republican party (which I didn’t see coming), who was self described as hawkish, but as a part of her campaign for the presidency she had a theme song and talked about how her blueberry muffins would be far better than Kruschev’s.\u00a0 The criticisms most commonly\u00a0leveled against her was that as a woman she lacked the stamina to be president, or that her emotions would cloud her judgement, and in her speech to announce her bid for the presidency she addressed those ideas along with her other limitations.\u00a0 It is kind of funny to listen to because she cites all these reasons that she shouldn’t run, and then says she’s going to do it anyway.\u00a0 The story called attention to the fact that what helped her to relieve stress was vaccuuming.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Her bid was such a long shot that I don’t think it was paid a lot of attention to, but in the story it is evident that she had to struggle to remain tough enough, yet feminine.\u00a0\u00a0Why are the two made into separate things?\u00a0 It made me think about Hillary Clinton and a little bit about Sarah Palin, but I’ll save that for Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Bringing it back to the novel though there seem to be these opposites, not polar, but very different in Janet and Jeannine.\u00a0 One very meek while the other asserts herself, and I think for what we’ve talked about concerning Jael, she and Jeannine would be polar opposites.\u00a0 As for Joanna’s place, I’m going to put her somewhere between Jeannine and Janet.\u00a0 It’s cleaner that way.\u00a0 So there is a scale of meekness to assertiveness, neither of which are portrayed positively.\u00a0 Here’s where the satire comes in – there seems to be no character hits some sort of neutral point.\u00a0 It’s either too much (Janet’s\u00a0smugness)\u00a0or too little (Jeannine’s whining).\u00a0 No such thing as a good woman in this story I guess (but you can’t say much for the guys in the story either).\u00a0 They don’t try to balance toughness and femininity and are portrayed negatively, but I don’t know if it is necessarily because of it.\u00a0 I ultimately don’t think there is a balance and I wish people could just be without the striving, but that is what you see if you look at Margaret Chase Smith or Clinton or Palin – a strived for balance that is unattainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can it be considered\u00a0a feminist book?\u00a0I do think there is a certain amount of satire in the way\u00a0Joanna Russ\u00a0is writing this, which may be an attempt to produce some resistance to notions about women especially considering the date when it was written, but I’m not sure.\u00a0 I mean, I still haven’t figured out what I … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}