RoseZ's Search for Woman's Idenity: Monday's Assignment January 26th, 2009

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Monday's Assignment January 26th, 2009

My name is Rose Harris. I am 63 years old and I am going to college to fill my days with learning. I retired from nursing several years ago and due to my health am not able to return to full time work. Not being able left me with lots of empty time and little to do. I needed something to give my life some reason. I have always enjoyed learning new things. Taking college courses fills my needs to prefection. It keeps me busy and my mind working and fills a long term wish for the answers to questions that I have continued to seek.

I enjoy the challenge of competing with the young adults in the classes. My mind workers slower, but with hard work I eventually learn and have been able to keep up with them.

I am taking this course on women's studies because in the sixties I was envolved in the equality movement (for the same job, same pay movement for women). I was part of the rallies (protests) and the excitement of those days still linger in my memories. There are still many questions and many things that need to be addressed even to this day.

But , I hope that women will still remain women and not become equal to the point of sameness with men. There are many areas where women have always had the advantage over men. These advantages they need to idenitfy and keep. It is ok to be different, but should be equal when it comes to eduacation, reconition, pay, and the right to improve oneself and one's situations.

Questions:

What makes a lady? Is a lady different from a woman, girl, female, etc?
Are women equal in the present time?
How does a woman become a feminists?
Why aren't all women feminitst?
Will women ever be seen as just human and not as the weaker sex, who have to have men to protect and take care of them?

1 comment:

triple x tinaJanuary 27, 2009 at 2:18 PM
I think its pretty awesome that you decided to go back to school, just to keep your mind busy, and active.
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I am Woman Helen Reddy 1975

Helen Reddy "I Am Woman!" I am woman, hear me roar In numbers too big to ignore And I know too much to go back an' pretend 'cause I've been down there on the floor No one's ever gonna keep me down again CHORUS: Oh yes I am wise But it's wisdom born of pain Yes, I've paid the price But look how much I gained If I have to, I can do anything I am strong (strong) I am invincible (invincible) I am woman You can bend but never break me 'cause it only serves to make me More determined to achieve my final goal And I come back even stronger Not a novice any longer 'cause you've deepened the conviction in my soul CHORUS: I am woman watch me grow See me standing toe to toe As I spread my lovin' arms across the land But I'm still an embryo With a long long way to go Until I make my brother understand Oh yes I am wise But it's wisdowm born of pain Yes, I've paid the price But look how much I gained If I have to I can face anything I am strong (strong) I am invincible (invincible) I am woman Oh, I am woman I am invincible I am strong FADE I am woman I am invincible I am strong I am woman

l Reasons for fighting for birth control /Margaret Sanger

"I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with pinched, pale, wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial flower; white coffins, black coffins, coffins interminably passing in never-ending succession. The sense piled one upon another aon another. I could bear it no longer... I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky." Margaret Sanger; recalling the death of a New York City woman who begged Sanger for the "secret" of preventing pregnancy.

Another Reason for fighting for birth control

Margaret Sanger's mother was pregnant eighteen times: eleven children, seven miscarriages, and was dead at age forty-nine. This is not an uncommon story in the nineteenth-century America. Sanger became an obstetrical nurse...on the Lower East Side of New York, where birth control was simply not available for the poor immigrant women there, and she saw one too many women go to the back alley for an abortion or self-abort with a knitting needle or a shoe hook or undiluted Lysol, and woman after woman literally died in my ;grandmother's arms and ;she said enough, there's got to be something better we can do. quoted from Alex Sanger; Margaret Sanger's grandson.