Abigail Sayre

Intro to Critical Feminist Studies

Anne Dalke

9/28/07

Out of all the texts we have read so far, the ones that I have identified with the most were James J. Sosnoski’s “A Mindless Man-driven Theory Machine” and Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Sosnoski really brought home for me some of the ideas that Virginia Woolf discusses in Three Guineas. In particular the idea of professionalism, which Woolf alludes to when she says that “[Professions] make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them” (Woolf, 66). Sosnoski attributes these ideas to the qualities of competitiveness and falsificity that he says are all too present in the

I think I used to be if not the worst nightmare, at least a bad daydream of feminist trailblazers. I reaped the benefits of their labors and never truly felt oppressed as a female, but was relatively ambivalent to the feminist cause. My high school assigned a fair amount of books by women, not just the Brontes, Austen, and Shelley, but Cisnero, Angelou, Hurston, Tan and more. For me, feminism was inapplicable to my immediate life, and almost historical, at least in America and other “enlightened” countries; I never applied feminism with the urgency of activism to my life, because I couldn’t see how or if I was being oppressed.

Dearest Zen calendar,

Let’s see, where shall I begin…?

I am a freshwoman from South Portland, Maine, and to be quite frank I have never even considered myself a feminist, nor have I even given the issue much thought. I consider myself to be a rather naïve and non-political person. Yet, here I am at a women’s college, in a course titled Introduction to Critical Feminist Studies. Hmm. If you are half as confused as I am, you’d maybe understand just how out of place I might feel here. Most days, I find myself wondering why I am here…and why I am in this class. But, as my Zen calendar said the very first day I arrived here at Bryn Mawr, “In your heart, you already know.”

    When I first walked into this class, I felt intimidated by the fact that I knew so little about feminism. As I listened to the intelligent, composed women around me analyze and challenge the ideas of writers such as Schweickart and Sosnoski, I felt terribly out of place. I even considered dropping the class, simply because I felt afraid to speak up, concerned that my thoughts were too immature, too incomplete, or simply not important enough to interject into the fast-paced conversation. However, being in this course over the past month has proven to be an amazing experience, one worth every bit of frustration I initially felt. Sitting down to write this paper, I find it hard to put my

The world that we live in is

separated by more than just oceans, rivers,

 mountain ranges and borderlines.

The world that we live in is

            What is feminism?  Many people feel strongly about feminism, and I have often heard individuals proudly declare that they are or are not feminists. Yet, I have never had a satisfactory definition of this term.  One month into a course entitled “Critical Feminist Studies”, I still have not been given a definition of feminism which I feel is sufficient.  Google returns 19,100,000 hits in .12 seconds in a search for the term “feminism”, the first of which is a lengthy and heavily annotated Wikipedia entry. Though Wikipedia is not normally a reliable source for any paper, the