HW 23: Chasms of Deep Worry

With Apologies to Virginia Woolf:
What is it about fiction and women that makes it oh so easy to disregard the work of them? I have been pondering that question as of late and have stumbled upon no good or easy answers. This blog post about different authors and texts for boys and girls it makes one think of seeking truth. Truth in all matters of genders, here or now. Boy children get to read about adventure and politics and mere girl child of love and house. What of it that we can’t read the same text, this question is one that I seek answer to. One might think this is a pattern of yesteryear, but think again for it is now on the blog, Collected Voices, http://collectedvoices.blogspot.com/2007/10/not-for-girls-how-teachers-are-limiting.html that you may find this troubling piece that so accurately depicts the chasm between the sexes. It is also troubling to think that women have been forced into little spaces where they may only write of love or stories with no wit or humor. “Happily my thoughts were now given another turn” (Woolf 77).

HW 22: Mars...Patriarchy is alive and well here

In Virginia Woolf’s novel, A Room of One’s Own she talks about how if someone from another planet were to pick up one of our newspapers it would be plain to see that our world is ruled by patriarchy (Woolf 33). She gives examples about how everything is owned by men and as a result everything but the cloudy forecast is controlled by them. She makes reference to this power as their way of holding on to the control and influence and illustrates how when they write about women’s inferiority they seem angry, and that anger must have to do with trying to keep their power away from women. When I checked out the Boston Globe for the same results I also found that even in this day and age someone could plainly see that men still have the majority of the power, money, and influence. Most of the stories were about men and their political power or their money making ways, and when there were stories about women it was about a teacher, and everyone knows teachers don’t have any money…

HW 21: Dear Little Cousin

Dear little cousin,
My understanding of Virginia Woolf’s novel, or at least the first chapter in, A Room of One’s Own is that she is talking about the inequities of women writers to men. She gives some examples like when she is sitting by the river gathering her thoughts to write, but she gets interrupted by a man who goes to that college and she is a woman and isn’t supposed to be there. My thought is that she feels like she is excluded from certain things because she is a woman and isn’t allowed access to what the men have access to. Another thing she talks about is literally having a room of her own to be able to write in. She talks about how you have to be able to afford that room and a lot of times women can’t afford that room like men can. I think this piece is important to people because she was ahead of her times in talking about sexism and about the things she couldn’t do because she was a woman.