Final: Part One

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and The Eternal Feminine by Rosario Castellanos were the most touching readings of the semester. They all emphasized the importance of a girl or woman’s confidence and its role in her empowerment personally, which reflects culturally and thus globally. Before a woman can take a role in politics or even in an environment as small as her community she has to believe that she can make a difference and create a support system that allows her to continue believing that regardless of adversity, which is what these readings tell the world.
To begin with Faludi tells us that the our culture is against us, not to defeat women or feminism, but to make women aware of the subtext of the media and how it treats women as a whole and how that effects each woman’s psyche individually. To be forewarned is to be forearmed and to begin a semester of Women’s Studies with this reading is incredibly effective, because it begins with a moral outrage and the following readings turn that moral outrage into a cause that this generation is desperately in need of.
Baumgardner and Richards Manifesta even the small bit given to the class underlines the importance of creating a community of women within the larger community in which those women live and work. There is no doubt that these women faced a lot getting to the high ranked positions they were in at the time this was written, but having one another’s support has everything to do with why they didn’t give up, which encourages this next level of women to do the same.
Mary Pipher takes us back to before these women were exploited in the media, or banded together to overcome these underminings into the importance of development in who a woman will become. Pipher reminds us that regardless of how sullen and moody a teenage girl may be she has a potential that needs to be encouraged rather than stifled by the common conceptions of who or what she should be, because at the point she starts making choices based on brand names and how she’s supposed to appear she becomes a what rather than a who.
Kindlon gives us the other side of that argument in that some girls develop beautifully on their own. That they are not as easily influenced by the media and culture as Pipher seems to think, but both perspectives are true in that there is no formula for a girls adolescence. She may walk in to the world confident and determined to change injustices, but on the same token she may not understand they there are injustices or more importantly that she has the power to change them.
The Eternal Feminine by Rosario Castellanos gives the image of what could be. The reading is a bit more user-friendly in that it isn’t facts and graphs, but a play and thus entertainment by definition. Having a wide rather of options to access the information is important. This also broadens our Women’s Studies’ horizons past that of just the U.S. and our history, but that of other women, and how other cultures have treated their citizens, their life force, without the reverence and respect each individual human deserves. Castellanos gives an outline of what each woman can be: a revolutionary, someone who works within the system but still tries to create change, a wife, a mother, a lover and so on.
All of these make me realize that while I may never run for office I can make a difference by giving girls an outlet, so when I can I will open teen writing workshops and create an internship role when I’m working on my novels that involve research. I also intend to write about strong women, both recreating history and establishing new images of the anti-damsel in distress.