gender and society Flashcards
Ephesians 5:22
“Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church … Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the world”
Genesis 3:16 “To the woman he [God] said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”
Mulieris Dignitatum - Motherhood is a woman’s telos; natural purpose
Motherhood is a woman’s telos; natural purpose
Both physically in that they have a womb and also psychologically in that motherhood creates a ‘special openness’ in a mother to their child
feminists point to anthropological study of different human civilisations, where it is found that there is a large degree of variation regarding gender roles between different cultures
Sartre argued that there was no objective purpose/telos because “existence precedes essence”
men + women have different but complementary characteristics given by God
- a womans personality means that she is more capable to attending to the needs of others than a man is
Mulieris Dignitatum - There are important and valued women in Christian history/theology
John Paul II also pointed out that there are many female European saints and that Jesus coming to earth was only possible because of a woman, Mary
emphasised how Mary made possible the coming of Jesus - she freely chose to take on the role of mother of the son of God
Simone de Beauvoir argues that the Christian valuing of Mary shows that it is only through being a man’s “docile servant that she will be also a blessed saint” in Christianity
Mary Daly - only to encourage women to become passive, submissive and obedient so that women would all the better become the sexual property of men.
Simone de Beauvoir
religion is merely a tool of the male oppressor group which keeps women under control in their oppressed place with false promises that they will go to heaven if they obey
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” This means she thinks that gender roles and differences are the result of socialisation
Judith Butler - Developed the theory of gender performativity, which challenges the notion of gender as fixed and explores its fluid, performative nature in society.
Anne Oakley
interviewed women about motherhood. She concluded that the so-called ‘maternal instinct’ comes from culture rather than biology
- feel powerless during childbirth, treated as ‘cases’
suggests Paul 11 is wrong to think that God created women with a maternal instinct - loses its moral authoritative force as something that ‘should’ be enacted.
- de beauvoir - motherhood forces women to suspend her own interests and personality
- leaves them crushed and without purpose
Mary O’Brien is a naturalistic feminist who argued that motherhood can be a positive thing if women are in control of their choice to become a mother
freud/marx
MARX Capitalism forces women into prostitution, and those who are exploited often do not realise it because they have been conditioned to think that this is just the way things are (false consciousness)
For Evelyn Reed the solution was to solve the problem of capitalism by rebelling against it.
Selma James and Maria Dallas thought that women should be paid for what they already do, recognising the importance of home making.
Carol Lobate thinks that this would trap women within the domestic realm and there would be no reason to leave it.
Alison Jaguar used the Marxist idea of alienation to show how women see their children as their ‘product’ and so become alienated from their children (and their bodies).
FREUD Dorothy Dinnerstein agrees with Freud that sexism is subconscious, as babies see their mother as both a source of pleasure and plain. The mother is also not seen as someone with an independent identity, but rather an ‘it’. Dinnerstein recommended co-parenting as a way of avoiding the development of subconscious prejudice.
Millet accuses the concept of penis envy as presenting women as deficient - Freud therefore had a bias which leads him to seeing men as normative.
