WS/AC240: Winter 2000Directions:
1. Answer the three questions posed below. Answers must be typed in 12 point font, double-spaced and have 1 inch margins.
2. Be sure to give references (including page numbers and dates of lectures) whenever quoting directly or using another's idea, argument, etc. Finally, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other mechanics of writing will be considered when grading exams.
3. We encourage you to make liberal use of assigned readings, lectures, section discussions. Utilization of the services of Sweetland Writing Center (located 1111-1148 Angell Hall) is also encouraged. We ask that you do not discuss your answers with others. The answers you turn in must be your own work and plagiarism will be dealt with according to University policy.
4. Completed exams are due by 2:10 in lecture Wednesday, February 16, and should not exceed 5 pages.
I. Identification: (15%; 5 points each)
Define and briefly explain in 2-3 sentences the significance of 3 out of 4 of the following terms:
1) consciousness-raising
2) "I advocate feminism"
3) Declaration of Sentiments
4) simultaneous oppressions
II. Short answer: (60%; 15 points each)
Choose 4 of the following 6 quotations. For each, explain in your own words in a short
paragraph:a) what is the main point of the quotation?
b) how does it contribute to our understanding of a
particular feminist issue?1) "The ubiquitous configuration of woman-food-man, with food expressing the woman's love for the man and at the same time satisfying woman's desire to bestow love, extablishes male hunger as thoroughly socially integrated into the network of heterosexual family and love relations. Men can eat and be loved; indeed a central mode by which they receive love is through food from women. For women, by contrast (who are almost never shown being fed by others), eating--in the form of private, self-feeding, is represented as a substitute for human love." (Bordo, 204-5)
2) "[Women] were talking about their personal experiences and analyzing them in terms of social structures rather than in terms of their own weaknesses." (Susan, 113)
3) "Slavery and the condition of the Negro had been a boiling national issue for thirty-five years; a war had been fought over it. No such intensity of feeling existed yet regarding the status of women, even among the women themselves, excepting in a still relatively small group. Opinion in Congress and throughout the North was concerned with assuring the vote for the Negro; it was relatively uninterested in how such a controversial measure would affect women." (Flexnor, 13)
4) ". . . 'embracing the paradox' is just what feminism cannot choose but do. There is no transcendence, no third course. The urgent contradiction women constantly experience between the pressure to be a woman and the pressure not to be one will change only through historical process; it cannot be dissolved through thought alone." (Snitow, 90)
5) "Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around that fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with their white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racal oppressors. We struggle with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism." (Combahee Rive Collective, 34)
6) "To Stanton, Gage, Mott, and their feminist contemporaries, the Native American conception of everyday decency, nonviolence, and gender justice must have seemed the promised land. As a feminist historian, I did not at first pay attention to such references to American Indian life because I believed what I had been taught: that Native American women were poor, downtrodden "beasts of burden" (as they were often called in the nineteenth century). I did not know what I was looking for, so of course I could not see it." (Roesch Wagner, 8)
III. Short essay (25%; 20 points) 2 pages
Using either the "politics of fashion" or "sexual politics," explain what "the personal is political" means and its importance to both feminist thought and feminist politics.