Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Male/Female Mind & Other Assortments

So I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a feminist. I mean, I guess anyone who thinks that women should have rights equal to those of men might actually be considered a feminist. There are just so many branches of feminism, if you will. I rather not classify myself with any movement or branch of a movement. For the most part I think that women should be permitted to the same things as men, given a few slight objections.
Who am I really to respond to Virginia Woolf, in her essay A Room of One's Own, clearly she is writing from a time period, and likewise a context quite different from my own. Interestingly, near the end of her essay she writes, "I consoled myself with the reflection that this is perhaps a passing phase; much of what I have said in obedience to my promise to give you the course of my thoughts will seem out of date much of what flames my eyes will seem dubious to you who have not yet come of age." Certainly, there are still instances in which women are having to fight for their rights because of injustices based solely upon their gender. Yet still, I fill obligated to write as a women there are also benefits that only I as a woman can reap. I fear my attempt to read Woolf's essay according to its historical context was quite frail and rather lacking because of my present context.
Woolf's notion based upon her observation of two people getting into a taxi and the satisfaction it gave her seemed strangely odd to me. She asks herself whether there two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes of the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness. She then sketches out a plan each person has two powers, namely, one male and one female. In the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman over the man. In an effort to reach what she terms a "normal" or "comfortable" state of being the two must live in harmony. Dare I say that I don't even know how someone could read this and not seriously question Woolf's mental status while writing this.
Regardless of the reality that Woolf's notion seems utterly bizarre, I also find that she seems to contradict herself later in the essay. On women's inability to fully relate to that which a man writes Woolf writes, "Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible." Here Woolf sounds more like what I would consider a feminist, or even just a person recognizing the differences between men and women, but what happen to her earlier notion of one sex having both a male and female mind?

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