5 important books on the role of women before the XXI century
We talk a lot about perception corporeality, seeking harmony with oneself, and how important it is for our common comfort to learn to accept and love the diversity and uniqueness of people in a multicultural global reality. However, this process is impossible without an understanding of how the existing relationship models took shape, how the notions of “right” or “traditional” were fixed in our minds and why changes are inevitable. As part of the conversation about the evolution of gender, we begin to talk about important and interesting documents from different eras on the theme "Woman and her position in society".
Mary Wollstonecraft
"In defense of women's rights"
1792
One of the first books in the history of feminism was written in the flames of the aftermath of the French Revolution by an obscure British woman with an incredible life story. Mary Wollstonecraft - the mother of the famous writer Mary Shelley - refuted almost all stereotypes about women of the late 18th century with her fate: she was born in a dysfunctional family, she learned several languages, raised her family on her shoulders and began to earn by writing, gaining great weight in journalistic circles. Her relationship with several notable men overshadowed her contemporaries for her contemporaries, however, “In Defense of Women's Rights” is a simple, lively and really interesting reading and a very interesting artifact about awakening awareness and responsibility inside a person, which has suffered many trials and adventures.
Wollstonecraft writes a short work out of 13 chapters on the need for general and co-education for the middle class and actively argues with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argues that a woman needs education in order to please a man. Her main thesis is the subordinate role of women, a property not innate, but carefully cultivated: "Trained from infancy that beauty is a woman's scepter, the mind adapts to the body and, wandering around its gilded cage, seeks only to decorate the prison." A heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory manifesto (the men in it are somewhere called more virtuous, and in some cases the religious argument about equality before God sounds) sometimes voices common places or idealistically separates the aristocracy from the middle class, but it concerns many painful ones and still problems not worked out like hypocrisy and objectification of women
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As an example, Wollstonecraft influenced the next generation of British women, including an excellent study of Victorian novelists. Also in 1928, the British playwright Bernard Shaw seems to write for his sister, but also for his female contemporaries a half-essay about the main political ideas that have seized the world: capitalism, socialism, communism and fascism. Using their example, he will explain in warm intonation how in modern states universal equality and the women's issue are of the second category, and the ability of contemporaries to consider themselves Pygmalions and to make decisions in an orderly manner is indestructible at the level of individual families, estates and states.
Betty Friedan
"The Mystery of Femininity"
1963
An important book of the second wave of feminism complements the pivotal and large-scale historical and culturological research of Simone de Beauvoir "The Second Sex" with offensive examples from real life of the early 60s. Betty Friedan’s vision is not a thousand-year-old philosophers, but her peers are women who are vulnerable and do not succeed, despite their efforts, and middle-class Stepford wives who left education or did not start working because of a husband or family.
Left journalist, dismissed during pregnancy by her second child, Fridan publishes many articles on gender roles and takes on her usual task in the late 50s - to meet former classmates for the 15-year anniversary of graduation from college. Several meetings grow into a book that no publication agreed to print as a series of materials. In 14 chapters, Betty Friedan deals with the secret of femininity, arguing with Freud, who was popular in America at that time, and citing Maslow's pyramid, where, according to the writer, women are locked in the first step in search of their sexual roles in marriage.
"The Mystery of Femininity" is a study of the myth of the ideal female role that permeates the American way of life: from the approach to schooling to social elevators, where a career should sooner or later be rewarded with a lottery ticket - a successful marriage. Fridan exposes this myth and explains how it helps the society work stably in the industrial age, how the trade turnover, priorities and lifestyle change. Simply written and impregnated with painful personal experience, the book Fridan instantly became a bestseller and a catalyst for the mass reflection of women about their place in society before the protest marches of the mid-60s.
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Later, a viable preserving policy towards women will be explained in another modern study by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre Inglish "For her own good", where intrusive and profaned advice on gender behavior are part of large-scale programming by pseudoscience, dubious "experts" and life style specialists education, marriage and psychology of the XX century.
Shulamit Firestone
"The dialectic of sex: the rationale for the feminist revolution"
1970
One of the main books of radical feminism was published in 1970 under the authorship of Canadian from the traditional Jewish family Shulamit Firestone. Seven years after the attacks on the writers Lawrence, Mailer and Miller and the research of women's objectification in Kate Millet's “Politics of the Sex” activist Firestone connects several key names from the history of philosophy — in particular, Marx, Engels, Freud and de Beauvoir — and contrasts im the concept of society of the future.
Marxists linked oppression to the emergence of private property, but Firestone sees the reason for the biological difference between men and women and explains how pregnancy, childbirth and weakness during nursing make women of antiquity and women of modernity equally vulnerable in their reproductive years. It is this restriction that determines the historical subordination of the woman to the man, the only way out of which can be the refusal of pregnancy and new ways to raise and raise children in equal conditions. The “dialectic of sex” is widely criticized for the extreme formulations and scope of topics, but the book receives a new perception and visionary qualities, taking into account modern biochemistry, the possibility of cloning and surrogate motherhood.
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The alternative view on feminism, formed by the second wave, is best captured from the historical works of another important, but controversial author with categorical rhetoric - Andrea Dvorkin, one of the toughest critics of pornography and female exploitation. An example of Dvorkin is a ready refutation of the stereotype that feminists become defeated in their personal lives: Andrea lived happily with her husband for 30 years, never ceasing to criticize the system for the values and “male” and “female” social behavior imposed on women. To understand the origins of the second wave of feminism, it is worth reading two books about the life of Dworkin: "Heartbreak" and "Life and Death". Both are sustained in personal intonation, and also witty, easily and accurately delineate the outlines of everyday and degrading circumstances and situations through which each person unconsciously passes before they gain their voice.
Judith Butler
"The problem of gender"
1990
The basic work of the philosopher Judith Butler of the early 90s, along with the later “Canceling Gender”, tells about the performative nature of gender: in her theory, every person, as an actor, plays a gender role every day, guided by social norms and majority programs, but plays so much and so often that ceases to distinguish the game from reality. The Gender Problem discusses, in the context of gender, the legacy of Marxism, Freud, Lacan, Cristeva, de Beauvoir, Derrida and Foucault - among the latter’s works one should definitely pay attention to the work “Supervise and Punish” and the three-volume History of Sexuality, where much attention is paid to change in relation to sexual freedom from antiquity to the present day.
Butler explains in detail in his books how the dominant majority repressively replaces the notions of naturalness and normality in favor of maintaining the status quo and habitual gender behavior. A body that possesses the nature of sex by nature already dictates the framework of the permissible and binds the personality that is contained in this body. Butler's main ambition was to create a new kind of public discussion about gender, in which a person and his wishes would be above artificial categories - "flexible, free-sliding and not caused by any stable factors."
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In some aspects, coinciding, and in some opposing, at about the same time, in 1987, the historian Gerda Lerner wrote his volume work “The Origin of Patriarchy”, citing anthropological evidence and artifacts that can serve as evidence that the patriarchy is the result of Western domination civilizations and the fruit of monotheistic religions.
The Guerrilla Girls'
"Bedside Companion for the History of Western Art"
1998
Guerrilla Girls - activists in masks of gorillas opposing sexism and racism in art and life since 1985 - have long been gone as a single organism: they have broken up into several competing communities and are being transferred to lawsuits. In any case, the book from the bedside table on gender stereotypes in classical and modern art is one of the most vivid, simple, loud and understandable books on the topic. Guerrilla Girls publications criticize and love for the same thing: propaganda intonation with an abundance of exclamation marks, poster aesthetics, easy handling of facts, evoking and understandable illustrations - it’s no secret that their books are more like a graphic novel than a book in the usual sense.
Guerrilla Girls relate to the objectification of women, the exploitation of the naked body in the salon art, the relationship of artists and models, the restriction of women in art education and the dominance of the masculine model of the great artist. Their liking is also contagious in a guide to female stereotypes in modern culture: from an old maid to a prostitute, from a girl with eggs to a princess - that mutate from books to movies, and from there to TV shows, despite the course of decades.
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Extreme messages, irony and anarchic mood of the same time can be grasped from the book about the radical punk feminists of the American movement Riot Grrrl by music critic Sarah Marcus. "Girls to the Front" is one of the recent and obvious stories of how a small community changes the direction of public debate within the country and how horizontal ties can overcome the vertical hierarchy.