Ha! It sounds like I’m not the only unnaturally rational and bossy woman ever. It’s comforting to feel part of a group.
Here. My feminist education is lacking. I am very often called unnaturally or unfairly rational, and also bossy. In fact I am neither, only competent. If my feminist education were better I would have realized before now that these were discriminatory terms based on gender stereotypes.
Axé.
Harris O’Malley’s polemics in the WP op-ed is just old wine in new bottles and the roots go very far back. In the nineteenth century women were diagnosed with hysteria (from the greek hystera =”uterus”) by male physicians steeped in the medical wisdom of Hippocrates whose ruminations were based on Aristotle who believed that women were inferior due to the deficiency of natural heat which would cook bodily fluids to produce semen which contained the whole human body in miniature. Thus (?) women would have diminished rationality and excessive emotion.
“It is the best for all tame animals to be ruled by human beings. For this is how they are kept alive. In the same way, the relationship between the male and the female is by nature such that the male is higher, the female lower, that the male rules and the female is ruled.” Aristotle, Politica, ed. Loeb Classical Library, 1254 b 10-14.
Clarissa is certainly part of a rational female group. I was reading recently an article by a Jewish woman living in America who was born in the Ukraine but only spoke Russian (sound familiar?) and goes back to confront her identity issues. She describes a family in the D.N.R. where the father and the son are on different sides of the conflict.
“Father and son lunged at each other like rabid dogs. Tkachenko recalled that they were blue from hate. The women pulled them apart and into separate rooms, made tea, and then tried to reason with them in the kitchen.”
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/07/fugue-state/
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Yes, I’m very well aware that my terror of the unexplained emotions comes from my very individual family dynamics. I picked up gardening, so maybe that will help.
Thank you for the link!
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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