"Claiming Education" and "Fantasies of Power"

As I was reading "Fantasies of Power", I couldn't help but chuckle to myself because Susan Douglass says it all just in the introduction. Her main foci of this reading is the issue of enlightened sexism, and the ways in which women seek to gain power in society today. She provides a historical background of events in the media that have shown how feminism has developed over the years. She introduces the book by mentioning the debate of whether or not the Spice Girls are a "vehicle" for feminism. She mentioned how they advocate girl power and their hit song "Wannabe" refers to how boys need to show respect to women. However these women wore skin tight clothes, conveying that image is a factor in girl power.

One of the main themes of this book is the topic of "enlightened sexism". This term refers to the impression that women have reached their goal in progress for equality and women's rights, and now it is time for them to concentrate on their image and fall into their role as sexy young women and girls. This term emphasizes that now that women have everything they want they can exert their energy on their appearance and men. Douglass argues that women are being cut short. Women still get 75 cents to a man's dollar.

Douglass highlights the importance of power in the sense that women rise up in the ranks if they are hot, attractive, make men fall for them, and women envy them. My favorite passage of this chapter in Douglas's book is "We can play sports, excel at school, go to college, aspire to-and get-jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers and so forth. But in exchange, we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing, about pleasing men and being envied by other women." I think that this passage reflects where us women are at today. I know that I have played sports my whole entire life, have excelled in school, but still feel the pressures to keep up my appearance in order to impress men and gain the respect of women. I am excited to continue reading Susan Douglas's work!

In Rich's "Claiming an Education", she is giving a graduation speech at an all women's college, called Douglass College. She focuses on how women need to claim their education and not receive it. She advocates that the difference between the two is that you are acting or being acted upon and women need to act. They can not act "as a container" but rather need to be the "rightful owner." She mentions how their are still a low number of women who actually are in the upper levels of faculty at higher levels of education. She is trying to make the graduating class of Douglass college understand that they need to think, talk, and act for themselves. They need to respect their own ideas and can not treat their bodies as objects, or else their "minds are in mortal danger." She argues that even today, women are still treated as sexual objects by their professors, instead of challenging their intellectual minds. Women need to demand to be taken seriously.

I think that both authors have some overlapping ideas in the sense that they both feel as if women are treated as objects rather than humans. I think that both of these readings are captivating and are a good introduction to the beginning of this course.