Can I make yet another plea for everyone to read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own? She's exploring EXACTLY these questions, circa 1929, but it's amazing how little things have changed in some ways. This man, Professor Dhaliwal, seems to have basically revised the book that Woolf invents as an amalgam of the things being written by men about women during her time, to wit: "The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of Women" by Professor von X.
Oh, look! here's a e-version of the chapter in which Woolf introduces us to this professor and makes some of the key arguments that I would love to quote for you here, but really, you should just read it in context, it is so funny and enjoyable.
She uses "Professor von X"'s eminent work to explore her own angry reaction to seeing book after book, by men, making sweeping (and often negative) claims about women. But then she turns to the emotions of the men writing these books, and notes a curious fact:
How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these books there was always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often present and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. To judge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open.
Her analysis of the workings of power and anger is pretty brilliant, and I've quoted some of it in my books thread (see my first link above). Oh, and lest we think Dhaliwal is a lone professor von x making a trogloditic argument, check out, blergh, the book "Manliness" by Harvard's emeritus professor von X, Harvey Mansfield. That links to an EXCELLENT review, on the Powell's book store site, written by Martha Nussbaum for the New Republic, in which she analyzes such quotations as:
"One has only to think of Jane Austen to be assured that women have a sense of humor, distributed in lesser quantities to lesser brains."
Ah. Well, I have to go spit nails, now. |
