On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Michelle Kendrick wrote:
> Yes. I agree -- but what I feel they need to realize is that it didn't
> get better *by itself* . There is no "evolutionary" progress here --
> that's what they assume, mostly... that things just "get better" as we
> move through history. I want them to realize that their cheery
> assumptions are built on the backs of women like Gilman who dared to
> imagine and women like Russ who dared to be angry. I am struggling with
> how to do that in an eye opening way -- not just a "You don't appreciate
> your history" lecture.
This is a particularly tricky one... as a twenty-year-old, it's been
sometimes hard for me to understand a lot of the anger I see in earlier
feminist writings. Gilman and Russ in particular, along with some of
Marge Piercy's more feminist poems, threw me a bit the first time I read
them, and I already considered myself to be feminist and aware of at least
some of the problems facing women currently.
In my own life, the best way to understand where those authors were coming
from is to read some less sf-oriented fiction from around the same time
period. You probably don't have time for this in your course, so this is
an almost useless suggestion, but the book that did it for me was "Braided
Lives" by Marge Piercy. It's certainly not classic literature, but it's a
good novel, and it captures a lot of what life was like for women then.
It's a very realistic, very straight-forward look at how things were
before the progress your students are talking about, and it shows a bit of
what had to be done to get there. It also drives home how recently all of
this has started changing.
I'm sure there are other books that could accomplish the same goal. I
admit to having no idea how you could integrate this into a course,
though, without raising complaints about workload. :)
-- Susan
groppi@hcs.harvard.edu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
i found god in myself and i loved her
i loved her fiercely -- n.shange
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