>Saying women are powerful in these surreptitious ways is a way of keeping them
>out of other legitimated and respected kinds of power.
That could be. Hopefully, though, people would mean that, yes, those women
are powerful and not read anything else into it like "and that's as
powerful as women should get" or "and they're blessed to be that powerful".
If I were to read anything into these kinds of statements, I'd hope it
could be: yes they're powerful, and it's a start and I recognize that at
the same time as I recognize that they're still not 'powerful' enough
because they're not considered equal with men's 'power'.
>On the idea that women really ran everything, I read something recently
>(cultural studies) pointing out that this was often a theme of 1950s
>sitcoms--the competent wife deviously helping out her dumb husband (eg the one
>where the wife was a witch). So perhaps Herbert was picking up on this
>zeitgeisty theme.
Possibly, but hasn't the idea of the women having the real,
behind-the-scenes power and letting their hubbies _think_ they had the real
power been around for centuries?
-Sean
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:48 PDT