I am reading...

This is especially fitting, considering that today is International Women's Day, but as I mentioned a while back, inspired by the wonderful lectures given by Patricia Waugh, I am doing a little feminist exploration. This wonderful snippet of Woolf is based upon a lecture that she gave at Girton College  Cambridge and is a pleasure to read. I spend a heck of a lot of my time puzzling over intricately worded articles and it is such a relief to find something which is more of a musing on matters than a analytic thesis. I've also started on  de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex', which is slightly larger than I had anticipated and therefore may take a little longer to peruse... in the mean time I think I will be reading a lot more of Woolf! 

L x

Good Old Gumption....

Something that has been addressed in a lot of my lectures recently, is Feminism, and though I can't quite see myself going down the radical bra-burning route, I'm finding it quite fascinating. Embarrassingly, it is not something that I have ever given a great deal of thought to, but I do now feel that it is something that I should have an opinion on. Should we be equal? Celebrate differences? Or remove gender identities all together? This is something that I need to decide upon, for it great affects the way that I not only view myself, but the whole of my sex.

Though feminism may now be labelled as rather passée, overshadowed by other equality campaigns, it is a divide of inequality that ever present. In 2010, the average wage gap across industrialized countries was 17.5%.  Therefore I have purchased Simone de Beauvior's seminal text 'The Second Sex', and Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' and intend to inform myself. 

The wonderful Katherine Hepburn came up in a lecture this morning - one of the first women in Hollywood to wear trousers and one who often turned up to auditions wearing men's suits.  She marked a new era for the female role in Hollywood transforming the women of enigmatic passivity into women of substance and gumption. Perhaps I shall purchase some of those style defining trousers and channel Katherine for today...

"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then." 

Katherine Hepburn