By the 1970’s Betty Friedan had moved on to the issue of how society sees and treats the elderly. While doing research for the last book called “The Fountain of Age”, she found that people who were talking about and treating elderly people the same way they did women 20 years before that. She felt that the elderly were becoming patronized and treated poorly as a person. She had not stopped being a feminist, but at this time there was a whole new group of concerns with society and the way the elderly were being…
In “Off Brand: The Limits of Celebrity Feminism,” Andi Zeisler uses two recent celebrity feminist-movement incidents as a starting point for her argument that celebrity feminism is holding back and depoliticizing feminism. One incident involves Kim Kardashian announcing at a conference as a keynote speaker that she holds feminist beliefs but she does not like labels therefore she does not identify as a feminist. The second incident revolves around the comedian Amy Schumer’s employment of a friend of hers as a writer for her show, Kurt Metzger, who has exhibited aggressive behavior toward women and feminists and rather vocally holds severely anti-feminist beliefs. Zeisler puts forth that this has been shown time and time again with the celebrities…
Haggard explains that society had created rules for the benefit of the whole community, and that individuals must keep their passions within fixed limits so that, if they do anything that may produce “mischief of one sort or another”, they do not cause ruin to the transgressor, “especially … if she be a woman.” (176) This belief conveys the societal expectations women were forced to uphold in Victorian Britain despite the inequality and double standards that first wave feminists were battling against. It is also Haggard’s belief that women, especially younger ones, need to be protected from the ideas of Romance fiction by saying that a “young lady, wearied with the account of how the good girl who jilted the man who loved her when she was told to, married the noble lord, and lived in idleness and luxury for ever after” (177) would only need to turn to the evening paper to see that this idea of romance in novels was a false picture of life. Consequently, this is also why, according to Haggard, men hardly ever read novels, because they are “for the most part rubbish,” and represents life in a way that is desirable for “schoolgirls”.…
With Limbaugh painting this false image of Fluke being a slut and having way too much sex, this is a public example of what many women face today. The War on Women is not a fancy title to just the issue of contraception. It is also about how the patriarchy silences women and what they are standing for. Fluke rebuttals on ABC saying “Historically, this is the language used to silence women.” This is not a new concept or idea.…
In the United Stated, poverty and homelessness are the most serious issue all over the major cities. According to the Institute for Children and Poverty, there were an estimated 1.35 million children were possible to undergo homelessness over the year of 2004. In the reading “Still Hungry, Still Homeless”, the authors use the data to express their concern of homelessness. On the other hand, Anna Quindlen’s article “Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Kids” uses a different way with different technique, which is more efficient, majorly discusses the problems of homeless children, from the cause to the effect.…
Imagine a world where women have a very little amount of rights, where women being hired was rare, and where only women cleaned. The only reason our world isn’t like that anymore is because of Betty Friedan, and others like her. Betty Friedan experienced having little rights her whole life, and one day wondered if other women felt the same way she did.…
While reading Anna Quindlen’s “Homeless” we are faced with the difficult question: Is a home everything? Quindlen has come to the conclusion, that yes your home is everything, and I cannot help but to agree with her. There is an understanding that there is a difference between a house and home. Whereas the building you are living in is referred to your house, your home is the compassion and comfort you feel in that house with your family and friends. Quindlen states that in your home you have, “certainty, stability, predictability, privacy” (Quindlen par. 4). Although there are downsides to owning a house, there is comfort and familiarity in one’s home because of the ability to have somewhere private to withdraw and family that helps raise…
The crisis of masculinity in the 1950s led to a series of ingénues, or non-threatening, innocent, young women, appearing in popular culture. As the men felt less important and felt their masculinity dwindling, the lesser women became because in society men are always held above women.“This alteration reflected the social values of postwar society, with its emphasis on marriage and he home as the defining components of a happy American life,” (Nash, pg. 169) After all, concerns about men’s loss of authority to women who were in the nation’s workforce while the men were at war in the late 1940s led to the crisis of masculinity. During this time, popular entertainment took on the masculinity crisis by taking teen film stars out of the spot light…
Prompted by the increasing amount of exorbitant prams being used by new parents as a marker so social status, Catherine Deveny's "Bugger Me, I Have Had Just About It With Bugaboos And Pramzillas In General" was published in the Age. In her piece, Deveny condemns the aforementioned "monster prams" and their materialistic owners. Deveny attempts to append those outside of the group of parents she is targeting in her opinion.…
with a mind that needs regulating by a more capable intellect: a classic (if sexist) portrayal of women in…
Anna Quindlen describes in the essay "Abortion is too Complex to Feel one Way About" the different situation that we as a human race are put in everyday. She talks about the topic of abortion in a way that one feels they have had to make the decision of whether or not a person is pro-choice or pro-life. She uses references that are of different personal experiences in the essay that are vital to the audience. Quindlen is writing to state her point that one should never put their self in this situation because one should take the proper responsibility. In this paper you will read about the conflict with abortion and what Quindlen thinks about this issue.…
Lynn Peril’s concept, “pink think” is a concept in which society has come up with a set of ideas and attitudes about what constitutes “proper” female behavior. For example, once upon a time, young girls were supposed to wear conservative dresses, and get boyfriends in hopes of those very boyfriends becoming their husbands and fathering their children so that they may become what was perceived as successful, a mother and housewife. These ideas and concepts were fit to the times that Peril mentions in her essay. Today, I believe that these stereotypes have indeed changed, and do not exist in our world today how they used to. However, naturally, new concepts and ideas have manifested in today’s world for young women in America.…
References: Basinger, Jeanine (1993). A woman’s view: how Hollywood spoke to women, 1930-1960. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.…
“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons. But few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”(Gloria Steinem quotes 2012). These influential words from Gloria Steinem reflect that we should dispel what negative views we may have about gender roles. Gender role is the behaviours, attitudes values, beliefs and so on that a particular cultural group considers appropriate for males and females on the basis of their biological sex.” ( Latibeaudiere, 2012).What we accept as the prescribed sex role in our society has been shaped by the influence of the media around us. According to Nicholson 1995,” It is apparent that mass media portray men and women differently.” The media is so intertwined in our lives that we do not truly comprehend on a conscious level how much influence it really has over us.…
Beverly Gross’s "Bitch" first appeared in the Salmagundi, a humanities and social sciences-based magazine in 1994. In this essay Gross mainly discussed about the meaning of the word “Bitch” changed across time. She analyzed the word in different perceptive, its offensive meaning, its contemptuous meaning and its literal meaning. As the meaning of the word “Bitch” is changing over time, it actually represents the women’s roles in the society is changing as well. Gross illustrates the word “Bitch” as a demeaning word, she claimed, “A word used by men who are threatened by women”. (Beverly Gross, P.628) It shows that men are willing to be the dominant of the society, and the word “bitch” is an ultimate weapon men have to humiliate women. Anecdotes, contrast and comparison are techniques Gross used to create a strong, powerful and persuasive essay.…