Quick Hit: A Student's Take on The Women's Room
Check out Kate Murphy, Fordham University senior, on The Women's Room over at the Women's Media Center. An excerpt:
As I plunged headfirst into The Women's Room, the most famous novel of the late feminist Marilyn French, I found myself submerged in a foreign world, or so I thought. Beginning in the 1950s, the novel follows Mira Ward through her teenage years, her young marriage, her life as a stay-at-home mother, and her subsequent feminist rebirth during her forties, while a student at Harvard University. Hers was a world where women were second-class citizens; where all that many young women had to look forward to was a life of suburban discontent and servitude. I found it shocking. But at first I just couldn't relate to it.
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As a college student, just wanted to say I don't bother reading these novels just because feminism apparently changes every single day.
One day it's about this now that and that and that and more relevant subjects of the times so I could totally relate how its hard to get into these kinds of books.
But I'll always love the classics.
Murphy raises some very good points and what I would add to her assertion that Feminism when embraced is a community, it speaks volumes to the fact that I think many of us are looking for our own kind of community. That some of us can find it in a network of like-minded women (and yes, some men *flutters eyelashes*) is fantastic, but there are so many people out there who are lacking any sense of community, regardless of what the common identity might be.
But any community is bound to have issues from time to time, just as any group of people has problems. This site is living proof of that. Still, at least it exists, and as Murphy implies strongly, getting more Feminists involved wouldn't just get us all on the same page, it would provide a needed outlet for us all in what can be a lonely world.
" “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke… She will need her sisterhood.” "
Even more if the woman in question is transsexual. It's sad that sometimes - Germaine Greer, Julie Burchill, Michigan Womyn's festival are you listening? - those who should support us hurt us worse than those we know are the enemy.