Tuesday, September 20, 2011

oral project!

I read over the material for the oral project and am super stoked about it! I cant wait to dive into some of the points it made like how history empowers us and that we can learn from the past to create a super bright future. The women i am interviewing is also very excited to get her voice heard because people at her home rarely listen to her :( This is going to be a great knew way to learn about history!

Oppression (Quotes)

The reading I am going to be doing my quotes on is the Marilyn Frye reading about oppression. In her writings she speaks very powerfully about how women are put down and they dont even know it. Some women would argue that they have never felt oppressed but after reading her article Im sure alot of women would change their mind. It talks about how women will forever be oppressed but men as men will not ever excperience oppression.
"Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers". (Marilyn Frye) I thought this was a pretty powerful view on what being oppressed really means. She goes on through the rest of the text to talk about how woemn get caught in these barriers without knowing they are in them. To be pressed is almost like being trapped with no way out. The three waves of feminsit show us that we are still pressed with no way out, even when we seem to fix a problem another one arises leaving us back at square one. She mentions being looked down upon because some women have sex so they are then considered loose. They are pressed into this mold becuase they really have no way of convincing people other wise because the judgemnet has already been made. So there they stay in those barriers of being a loose girl.



"The guy removed a barrier to the lady's smooth and unruffled progress". (Mariyln Frye) This quote is dicussing the process of a man holding a door for a woman. A harmless gesture that most would see as something sweet and worth awing over is acutally in Mariyln's eyes a means of oppression. She discusses how this is just another way that a man makes a women feel incapable. She aruges that men can open a door for a women and do that small favor but can't do their own laundry. Its almost as if the man is trying to say "hey i can do something other than provided". I kind of veiwed it as a way of keeping the women in love or in like with the man. If a man opens the door its cute but say later you get in a fight, or feel unappreacited, the man could just be like well i was a gentlemen and held the door for you. Marilyn may not agree but that was partly how i saw it being oppressing.


"People can and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see macroscopically and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systemactically related in larger schemes". (Maryiln Frye)
This quote ties together everything the article talked about. How men get away with either purposely or accidentally oppressing women because people see a bigger picture as oppose to looking at it carefully and taking a step back to be like wait what? She is trying to open peoples eyes in her article and help women be more aware of there world around them. If no one points it out does it still exsist?