a reply to:
Beartracker16
Yes you can, the creative commons is a wonderful thing enhanced, as it is, by the internet. And it is good to be able to demonstrably
see that
progress has been made. Books and objects that we're once seen only by an elitist bunch of white men are now freely available to all to consider and
to comprehend what role those beliefs have played in our social evolution. As well as how the with-holding of them caused a deeply detrimental effect
on both the collective human psyche and the environment that we have taken upon ourselves to manage.
Now, I speak largely of Europe in this, the exclusion of women from certain bodies of knowledge, the US at that time was not similarly afflicted,
which is what made the "land of the free" such an attractive prospect for women who wanted to be more than just someones wife (without having to give
up the option of being someone's wife, in much of Europe, at that time, a woman needed her husbands permission to be educated or to engage in any sort
of profession). In Europe, if a woman wanted to pursue her education she had to effectively crush her sexuality, femininity and maternal instinct
whether she entered the convent or not. In America not so. Women were opening schools, universities and medical schools, and teaching each other,
setting themselves up as equals to their men, while in Britain, women were having to prove themselves over and over and over again before they were
even allowed to matriculate (and there's an irony in that word). So from America, contemporary to the time of the Secretum, we get the beginnings of
excellence in female scholarship while Europe is still dragging itself out of the Reformation.
And still, the US is leading the way in gender and women's studies, everyone else is still dragging at their heels, but then it was in the US that the
first ever organised political action by women
for women took place. In 1649-50 the Mistress Alice Tilley, a midwife who was tried and
convicted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Court of Assistant, was released following the submission of six petitions from 217 women from the
Massachusett and Dorchester regions who had used Alice's services and found her to be "The Ablest Midwife that wee knowe in the land".
In that case it was decided that in matters relating to women (at least), women should be involved in the decision making process and their voice
respected. An enlightened view at that time indeed and one that all women of the world can turn to for inspiration. In Europe women like Marie
Stopes had to go to the British Museum to learn about sex, and a generation before Anne Besant had been imprisoned for publishing a book on the birds
and the bees (from an American, though male author, Charles Knowles I think) and lost custody of her children to boot.
In short, while Europe placed it's women on pedestals, objectified and metaphorically chained to a single idealised and objectified archetype, in the
US they were much freer, offering a greater diversity of role models to inspire the next generation.
Eliza Gamble Burt is one of my favourite early authors on the subject of gender, and her astute observations lend light to the ignorance of those
elite white males who's homo-hegemonic predispositions wholly distorted our understanding of our own social and cultural evolution, effectively
severing us from our environment through our own conceited ignorance of evolutionary superiority, leading to the widespread destruction and
over-exploitation of that which should sustain us.
Also on the internet.
www.authorama.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
You can put all the information in the world on the internet, but without a brain willing to engage critically with it, it's just...
edit on 22-9-2018 by KilgoreTrout because: gah