Feminism: Final Version
The
movement I am going to talk about is Feminism: a theme I found in Sylvia
Plath’s poetry. This woman was an American poet, married with Ted Hughes, that
commited suicide after years of depression, and one aspect of this depression
was the infidelity of her husband who left her for another woman, just after
they had two children. Her life and suicide inspired a lot of feminist coments,
that said her husband was the main responsible of her death. ( http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/splath.htm
)
But the Feminist movement did not start
with Sylvia Plath at the 20th century. It is thought that any
resistance of the woman to the society is a beginning of feminism. One example
of this is the Celtic women who defended themselves from the men’s attack. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism
)
But we can talk about feminism as a movement just after the
Enlightenment, with women as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Marquis de
Condorcet championing women’s education ( http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/headerindex.html). I think this moment was when women started to have the opportunity to
talk, before the Enlightement women were only an object, men’s object, and at
19th century women started to fight for becoming free, and because
they wanted to have their own thinkings, it is at that moment when we can talk
about a feminist movement. I think that the Celtic women were only an example
of women that fought for their lifes, but the most important example of the
free thinking of the women started at the 19th century. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism
)
There are a lot of points that started
the Feminist movement, for example:
1) the use of male nouns, never female. Nowadays we can find lots of words
that generalize, for example, professions: before “ salesman”; now “ sales assistant”.
2) Another point was that women were not hired because they must be at home
taking care of their children.
3) Women had not the oportunity of studying, because I think men thought
women had no intelligence, women were in the world for being at home.
Well,
there are more points, but I do not want to talk about the reasons that incited
the Feminist movement. I wanted to talk about women poets in history.
During this year we have talked about
Poetry from the beginning to the present day, and I have seen more men poets
than women. We can talk about Mary Shelley or Ezra Pound, and of course, Sylvia
Plath ( but this last woman lived in the 20th century). We know that
women could never write, because as I said before, women had not the oportunity
of studying. It was not well- seen women writers. And we know too that there
were women that wrote, but they must take pseudonyms.
Sylvia Plath became a good example of
feminist because she wrote about her life, her experiences and of her husband.
Through her poetry we can see that she was against the acts of her husband, we
can see that she suffered because her husband was unfaithful. When she died her
husband published her poems, and everybody could know all about Sylvia’s
concerns. Some women started to criticize Ted Hughes, and we can talk about a
feminist movement started by Sylvia Plath’s poems.
One woman that talked about Sylvia
Plath’s poetry was Janice Markey in her book called: A New Tradition. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne
Rich: A study of Feminism and Poetry. Published in 1988. ( http://www.cddc.vt.edu/femisnism/lit.html).
We could listen to a record of a
conversation in the Poetry class, where two persons were asked about what they
thought of the relation of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and we could see that
although nowadays Ted Hughes is accused of murdering. Women think the he caused
her death psychologically. And he wrote poems where he acused himself. But I
think he said this because he did not want to lose popularity.
In conclusion I think women started the
Feminist Movement because they were very opressed by men, they were treated as
objects, as if they had no mind. Women were only for taking care of their
children and for being good wifes, but they wanted to be more important in
society. They wanted to be self- sufficient and they wanted to have their own
life. During all of history we can see very good women writers, but never
recognized their talent. The Femisnist movement was a good thing to demonstrate
the possibilities of women, that they can be as good as men. I think it would
be better that men and women left their war of sexes and started to recognize
the talent of a writer as a writer not as a woman writer or as a man writer.
