What Are Women's Oppression?

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While reading the articles and a poem I found myself reading the literature like I would read in my ethics class, which was tough. I would go back and re-read and research topics that I came across and didn’t really understand and it would take awhile. I would find myself digging deeper and I was able to connect some of the ideas from these readings to my previous classes.

The first article “Feminist scholarship and the social construction” brings up Levi-Strauss who wrote during the second wave of feminism in the U.S wrote Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969). He believed in social order and that “woman are the gifts that men exchange between each other.’(Greene 7) This meant that men had all of the power and were in charge of the women, …show more content…
I was wondering since Greene said,
“The oppression of woman is both a material reality , originating in material conditions, and a psychological phenomenon, a function of the way women and men perceive one another and themselves.” (Greene 3) Would this make another woman the oppressors or the men the oppressors? In the Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism article by Sydney Kaplan she states “the works of female authors might also concentrate on the ways in which such images reveal woman oppression” (Kaplan 38). Is what Kaplan said suggest that women oppress themselves by reading and writing about these strong female roles in the books? In the poem Girl written by Jamaica Kincaid the whole poem was about how oppressed she was. There was line after line of her being told what she needed to do or act. In some cases in this century there are women who are still told “don't squat down to play marbles-you are not a boy, you know” (Kincaid 1340) ladies are still being told they can’t be firefighters because it isn’t what a lady does. Who should be the one telling the ladies that they can’t do something just because they don’t have both an X and a Y chromosome? Then when I read more about the Literary Canon, I read that it is mostly guys who judge a piece of literature. I’m sure they are fantastic judges but, would it really
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