Word: women
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With individual considerations dispensed of, the remaining abstraction is either idealized or debased. Women are glowingly told that their lack of ordinary creativity is made up for and surpassed by the creativity of bearing a child. Here again They confuse individual personal worth with sexual function and voluntary, conscious achievement with involuntary, passive achievement. At the same time, women as sexual objects are the butt of endless jokes; getting pregnant is getting knocked up. One of the most ingenious of Their numberless stereotypes is the belief that women can be salvaged from piety, ambition, bad temper, nervousness, sadness, fear, worry...
HERE ALSO is a key notion put forward by Mrs. Ellmann when she turns from Their analogies to Their view of women themselves. This is the idea that men must struggle to achieve manhood, they must prove themselves in all sorts of tests, while women are women and must transcend the failings of their sex to attain their ideal condition. Manhood is a title conferred; womanhood is a judgment to be escaped. They say "he's a man" in praise of any manifestation of worth; the equivalent for women is "she's a real person." "She's a woman...
Beneath this is Their unfailing tendency to see Woman lurking behind every individual and to define Woman exclusively as a sexual being. They don't like women to deviate from preconception, and when women do threaten to leap the boundaries their achievements are either discounted or attributed to some mysterious quality of femininity. At one point Mrs. Ellmann quotes an article on Sylvia Plath...
...OBVIOUS that the villain of the story is They. Mrs. Ellmann does a good job of pinning down the general view of femininity; she even manages to grind her axe gently. But instead of explaining why the view exists and how it affects real women she trails off in feeble optimism. She argues that writing and opinions are moving toward a mode of indecision, a non-judging, antiabsolutist, amoral, particularized view of life in which no form the species can take is not somehow acceptable and in which the artist's aim is to become rather than to judge...
Presumably, though Mrs. Ellmann stops here, when the imagination of the multitude seizes on this world view women's minds will be finally liberated. But even overlooking the fragility of this vision of a non-struggling, non-judging society, problems arise. Everyone can't groove passively on the complexity of reality; someone will have to make decisions and run things--and it is then that we will have women factory managers and women Presidents; men's minds will function on higher levels...