Happy International Women's Day!
Mar. 8th, 2010 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifan_importHappy International Women’s Day!
I encourage you all to make a contribution to Amnesty International, who fight for women’s rights around the world – for the prosecution of rapists, the protection of mothers and an end to female foeticide. (If anyone wants to suggest other charities aimed at helping women – especially ones related to education – please do so in comments.)
Since I’m thinking about Jane Eyre anyway (I’m about to do an essay on it) a question for you – do you consider Jane Eyre to be a feminist or proto-feminist book? What sort of statement do you think it makes for its time? If you do consider it feminist, I’d love to know why. And not just because I can use arguments for/against in my essay. ;) I don’t, truthfully; although its protagonist is a woman, and its status as the first English bildungsroman about a girl matters, I don’t see much feminist cred there. “Women feel just as men feel” was not a revolutionary statement to me: the ‘women feel, men analyse’ paradigm was well-entrenched by 1847.
...Heh. I am SUCH an English undergrad today!
I encourage you all to make a contribution to Amnesty International, who fight for women’s rights around the world – for the prosecution of rapists, the protection of mothers and an end to female foeticide. (If anyone wants to suggest other charities aimed at helping women – especially ones related to education – please do so in comments.)
Since I’m thinking about Jane Eyre anyway (I’m about to do an essay on it) a question for you – do you consider Jane Eyre to be a feminist or proto-feminist book? What sort of statement do you think it makes for its time? If you do consider it feminist, I’d love to know why. And not just because I can use arguments for/against in my essay. ;) I don’t, truthfully; although its protagonist is a woman, and its status as the first English bildungsroman about a girl matters, I don’t see much feminist cred there. “Women feel just as men feel” was not a revolutionary statement to me: the ‘women feel, men analyse’ paradigm was well-entrenched by 1847.
...Heh. I am SUCH an English undergrad today!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 10:12 am (UTC)Good question. Charlotte Bronte wanted women to have more opportunities, and the suffrage movement was underway and everything, so reading it in that light makes sense to me.
What I would love to do is compare the models of women between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea which has intersectionally all of the shop.
*nodnod* Absolutely! I brought up intersectionality in my seminar, actually - Charlotte was a bit of reactionary class-wise, so there's lots of interesting stuff to talk about.
Although I had to explain what 'intersectionality' is. I used this whole colour metaphor (if sexism is yellow and racism is blue, then black women face both yellow, blue and green) which may have come off as INCREDIBLY condescending but I couldn't think of anything better.