For this post, I want to focus on the article by Audre Lorde. One thing she brings up is that "only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women." I would have to disagree with this bold statement. I would say that social power is the power one has in society and among peers. While yes women do have power in the home they also now have the power to vote and have a career. We now have a much powerful say in society.
I do however agree with her when she says that "survival is not an academic skill." She continues on to say that "it is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths." I felt that this quote really stuck out to me. Females had to learn how to relate to one another and become strong. We see this continuing in our society today with women attempting to run for high positions of power with some succeeding and some not.
I definitely agree with what Erica that I had two different reactions o the piece by Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." However, I found it refreshing that instead of always focusing on the white females view, which I feel like most of the other works that we have read in this class have done, Lorde acknowledges that we need to establish a connection between the differences of all women rather than just white women. I think that this piece along with "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh, tied in nicely with Johnson's piece. The key point that I took away from all three authors was that we cannot just focus on a single individual or group of individuals as being the source of the inequality epidemic plaguing America today. McIntosh and Lorde, I thought broke down the overall message that Johnson was conveying into smaller parts. We have to realize that men are not the only ones who are oppressive. We as white women are also oppressive to women of other ethnicities. If we want to see actual change in the system, we can not just expect men to be the only ones to make that change, but women as well. As Lorde stated: "Only within that interdependency of strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters."
ReplyDeleteI read "On The Rag" by Tiya Miles and this is what I thought. I have never put thought about the word, “feminism” as a strictly white struggle. However after reading, On The Rag, by Tiya Miles, I was better able to understand how black women could feel oppressed by this word. So white women and black women developed a kind of biased towards one another. Tiya explains that the falsity that feminist activism had been exclusive to white women “led some of us…to reject feminism immediately and refuse to work with white women who claimed the label”. And on the other side, the lack of knowledge about black feminist history on the part of white women “led some of them to automatically deny black women’s critique of white feminist racism and to categorize womanism as a watered-down version of ‘real’ feminism”(178). This lack of understanding on both sides, has undoubtedly created a sea of problems for these women’s’ efforts in confronting problems facing women today. It’s interesting how we form these biases about race without even knowing or (caring to know) much about each other’s past. I find it interesting that these battle lines are formed and racial tensions arisen all because of a lack of historical knowledge and misunderstandings between white and black women.
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