Preview

Post-Marxist Feminist Reading on the Progress: a Short Story by F. Sionil Jose

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1770 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Post-Marxist Feminist Reading on the Progress: a Short Story by F. Sionil Jose
Post-Marxist Feminist Reading on The Progress:
A Short Story by F. Sionil Jose

By Althea Kitz Gopez
Eng 62.1, 1st Sem, SY 2012-2013

Upon reading F. Sionil’s short story “The Progress”, my initial reaction was that the characters where described based on the stereotypes of Filipino working citizens. The author was able to highlight common Filipino economic problems. However, a female portrays the role of a breadwinner, instead of the usual male character. Marina Salcedo, a government employee from the province who has worked for twenty years, experienced oppression in her male dominated work place. The author was not specific with Marina’s character, but rather, described her stereotypically instead; focusing on the experiences and roles of Filipino women in the society. Although Filipino women have come to level with the working class society, there are still cues of their marginality, whenever and wherever a man is of higher rank than them.

Most of F. Sionil Jose’s story depicts economic and social issues. Studying his works in a Marxist approach is very relevant, since he himself also aims for equality in the hands of the economists, the government, and/or in the different social classes in the Philippines; he writes only aiming for social justice and change to better the lives of average Filipino families.

F. Sionil Jose is one of the most widely-read Filipino writers in the English language. He has written a number of novels, short stories, and essays (some of them are being studied in literary classes, and/or for thesis/dissertation papers). Jose was born in Rosales, Pangasinan, the setting of many of his stories. He is currently a columnist in a national newspaper company in the country.
This study aims to determine the cause of oppression of women in the working class society. It is analyzed in a Post-Marxist Feminist approach, focusing on Heidi Hartmann’s ‘dual systems’ stance on patriarchy and capitalism. Sexual division between men and women is

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Into The Killing Seas

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In the book Into the killing seas there were two boys that were on the USS Indianapolis as it was sinking was a very exciting book. The book made sense in the it was explained. All the info was true to a point. But over all it was a great book.…

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In this essay I will explore the different schools of feminism such as Marxist, liberal and radical feminism, who share the view that women are oppressed in a patriarchal society but differ in opinion on who benefits from the inequalities. Each school of feminism has their own understanding of family roles and relationships which I will assess through this essay.…

    • 1343 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Another type of feminist is Marxism, these argue that the main cause of oppression of women in the family is capitalism and not men as suggested by other feminists. Women’s oppression have several functions for capitalism, these include: Women reproduce…

    • 880 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Marxist Feminists who believe that capitalism creates inequality due to its nature argue that more fundamental changes are needed to society to tackle inequality and consequently gender equality. Marxist feminists recommend a total upheaval of the nature of the capitalist system. Marxist feminists argue that women’s subordination suits the need of capitalism as they are part of the reserve army of labour which puts them at a disadvantage and therefore are beneficial to the operation of capitalism. However Marxist feminists are criticised heavily by postmodernists how question traditional Marxist feminist arguments as they do not take into account the considerable social change which has taken place in the 19th and 20th century which has contributed to the feminisation of the workplace and women are more likely to be paid more than men.…

    • 742 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Materialist or socialist feminism emphasizes the differences which particularly refer to the social and economic differences between women, by positioning the gender oppression in the analysis of class and…

    • 2645 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In her essay, One is Not Born a Woman, Monique Wittig explains, “‘Women’ is not each one of us, but the political and ideological formation which negates ‘women’ (the product of a relation of exploitation). ‘Women’ is there to confuse us, to hide the reality ‘women’ . . . For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we call servitude.” Monique Wittig attacks the concept of naturalizing biology and the ‘woman’ category. She believes that the form of a woman’s identity is a product of normal and intrinsic human facts. Thus, her main point is that one is not born a woman but becomes a woman based upon the social constructs of gender and sexuality. This analysis serves to expose the holes in Wittig’s arguments, especially her criteria for a sex-less society.…

    • 1409 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    To construct a suitable analysis, she follows Karl Marx’s lead to seek out the perspective of the most oppressed class to from which to describe the subjugation that structures their social relations. In a patriarchy that class are females since, as she argues, “like the lives of proletarians according to Marxian theory, women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point that can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy” (284). This unique vantage point, “a feminist standpoint (will) allow us to understand patriarchal institutions and ideologies as perverse inversions of more humane social relations…”…

    • 1855 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The main theme in this book is feminism, which is a movement to put an end on sexism, sexist exploitations, and oppression. Throughout the chapters, Hooks, protests against the anti-feminist movement because they have been misguided by patriarchal mass media spreading lies that males are not welcomed by feminists. The patriarchal mass media tends to focus more on the feminists who are anti-male and depict a picture to everyone else that feminist are anti-male as well. This is not the case according to Hooks, a prominent writer about popular feminist theory and cultural criticism. She examines how the feminist movement branched into two different groups; the reformist thinkers and the revolutionary thinkers. Reformist thinkers tended to fight more for gender equality especially in the work force which was a quicker endeavor. A major problem with this group is that they do not practice equality among other females when pertaining to race or class. The latter wanted to transform the entire social system in order to bring an end to patriarchy and sexism all together regardless of class or race. In the end the reformist won out by convincing the government for equal pay between men and women but failed in putting an end to sexism. This group, once obtaining equal status amongst male in the work force gave up the fight to end…

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Working class women have always distanced themselves from being overly sexual due to the historical connotations of being sexually excessive. Chapter 8: Outlines the refusing recognitions of feminism, the women all had a general idea of what feminism entails however, the representations of feminism were negative or portrayed to be not accessible due to capital deficiency. The women failed the desire to be positioned in an individualistic autonomous discourse of feminism moreover, agreed with elements such as The Equal Pay Act. Many of which wanted to remain in a traditional patriarchal cohesion with their partners/husbands.…

    • 1407 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Prominent French feminist theorist Monique Wittig explains the erudition, “it is like taking out the master role so the slave role diminishes so it goes with the woman/male relationship.” This essays analyzes Joanna Russ’s book, The Female Man, collocation with second wave feminist quandary, ideals, and anecdotes. Because Feminist ideas encompass larges spaces, times, and ideals, this essay limits the examination to Russ’s four main characters and their alternate universes and their synergy to three feminist themes in the 1970s as well as in the books plot; the work place, sexual reproduction, and combat of sexism (physical and intellectual). This essay seeks to…

    • 516 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    “During the 19th and 20th centuries, individuals who broke the law were seen as the creation of social disorders, therefore punishment was considered to be justified only as of the following (1) it protected society by acting as a deterrent or by temporarily or permanently removing one who has injured it or (2) it aimed at the moral or social regeneration of the criminal.” (Bernard, 2014)…

    • 1161 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Women in the Soviet Union

    • 3235 Words
    • 13 Pages

    Working women in capitalist countries. Capitalist “democracy” has not and cannot give freedom to working and laboring women. Working women in all bourgeois countries are economically and politically enslaved. Middle class conventionality has a tenacious vice-grip on daily life. Advanced women workers and revolutionary women proletarians are persecuted. The most brutal blows of capitalist “rationalization,” unemployment, and hunger in the midst of plenty descend upon the female half of the proletariat. Fascism, Catholicism, and reformism with…

    • 3235 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Marxist feminists emphasise how capitalism uses the family to oppress women and the consequences the family has on women’s lives. Margaret Benston (1972) argued that capitalism benefits from the unpaid workforce of women who are willing to do what they are told because they have been…

    • 671 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    “Yet, one cannot dismiss the substitution of life for death as simply false” (pg. 326). Men constructs social associations in their own form, so women too must partake in social affairs that depicts abstract masculinity: - depreciation of women's effort - construction of women's effort so that it annihilates minds and bodies - separation of women from one another in domestic work - female suffering of forfeiture of self in provision and service to others - suppression of all this underneath layers of ideology 4. Necessity for struggle, tussle and scrutiny in order to accomplish and attain the feminist standpoint. 5. The feminist standpoint is a foundation for getting past these relations, on the way to a problem-free social combination: - Capitalism should support the proletariat and help promote the likelihood of a society exclusive of class dominance.…

    • 1089 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Term Paper on Feminism Jnu

    • 26748 Words
    • 107 Pages

    Much of today’s world can be termed as developed considering the economic development worldwide. Nowadays much of the society is being built by the males and females equally but this was very much unlikely even in the previous decade. However, still today a lot of the under developed and the developing countries deny to treat males and females equally because they feel differently about these two genders. This very ideology gave rise to the concept of feminism. Feminism not only deals with the problems the female population faces but it also deals with the kinds of oppression the females have to face, be it at the workplace or at home.…

    • 26748 Words
    • 107 Pages
    Powerful Essays

Related Topics