Why Not Both?

Post date: Mar 26, 2017 10:40:29 PM

Side note: while reading this, I forgot I had my phone next to my elbow and it fell, shattering the screen. I now have glass splinters in my fingers. BUT I get a new phone that isn't an iPhone so props to my inherited clumsiness!!

While reading Laura Cereta's letters, I couldn't help but make associations back to early feminists. Those who advocated for equal opportunity to be educated, or gain political rights. They were elitist and very much not intersectional. They didn't recognize class struggles, race struggles, or that women led different lives with different interests.

Laura writes very much like these feminists thought. It's a simple view of equality, that simply educating people will lead to equal status in society. She talks on the idea that women choose to devote time to fashion and saying "cute little things" instead of learning (79). I counter with the idea that not only is this very much classist, it ignores that some women cannot educate themselves for the work for a living, that some women don't have the privilege to have access to an education, and some women like to be "frivolous."

Laura when she writes lauds women, especially historical ones, and condemns men who condemn women thinkers, but at the same time she exhibits much of the same prejudices her critics do. She has internalized misogyny in a way. I can see why her letters are labeled feminist, but it is very much a White Feminism that ignores the individuality of women in different situations than her. It's a feminism for the elite who have leisure and opportunity and above all else, money, to pursue education. She critiques women who like fashion, who gossip, who are "shallow," as if these qualities make them less worthy of respect. She puts down other women to raise herself up, something distinctly not feminist. She doesn't outright recognize that women act this way and are forced into these roles due to society's expectations and pressures. Just because she had the privilege to break free, it doesn't mean every woman could or wanted to.

I do like how she allows herself to be angry, as that trait isn't associated with women and that women aren't allowed to feel. This can be seen in the 18 and 19 sections pg 75 on where she calls out critics with venomous language. She also for the most part expresses herself as a "man" would and could within this society, which lends me to respect her for that, as she isn't attempting to fit herself into a womanly mold but trying to get society to accept her as she is. In many ways, she reads like any educated philosophical man, but her woman status has her talk of womanly pursuits such as marriage and embroidery in a way that breaks away from men. Her way of writing and tone reminds me of Alexander Hamilton in many ways, as both were underdogs within society who had to fight for respect and an education, though for different reasons.

Laura is complex but limits herself to being elitist and condescending to other's views in a way that, in my mind, makes her only vaguely "feminist."