Sam Dockery (srd2338)

Professor Jerome Bump

E603B | Spring 2016

World Literature E603B Final Exam:

The Universal Oppression of Women

Over seven billion people currently inhabit Earth.  With so many humans living across the planet in the present day, one would think that the diversity of thousands of different types of cultures would lead to thousands of different types of views on moral issues.  And for the most part it does—depending on the overarching religious beliefs and customs of a society, the views of a white American living in the southern United States will differ drastically from that of a Syrian jihadist fighting against the oppression of his government.  This vast diversity between cultures is responsible for almost every historical and present conflict, an unfortunate part of the human condition.  Indeed, at this rate, it remains to be seen if a peace among the human species will ever be reached.  But if humanity is to one day stop fighting, there must be some sort of universal, unifying issue for man to get behind.  Truly, there seems to be only one such issue: that of the perceived inferiority of women.  This belief stretches across the globe, the result of thousands of years of male domination that defined the lives of the earliest humans.  Studying and understanding the numerous atrocities that women have been subjected to throughout history in varying cultures is the only way that man may one day be at peace, an exposé that all humans must be aware of.  Depending on the culture, woman’s struggle might come in varying forms, but again, the very presence of female oppression is what unifies the human condition.

            One such example of the oppression of women comes from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a novel about a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove’s, search for identity.  Morrison’s densely poetic writing style describes the daily struggles that African Americans face in a post-Depression Ohio in a darkly beautiful way, centering mostly on the theme of “white beauty.”  This idea of Caucasian features being more desirable than African American features affects every character in the novel in some way, but none more so than Pecola.  Born into a dysfunctional family, Pecola longs for blonde hair, blue eyes, and light skin, idolizing Shirley Temple as the ideal of beauty.  On the surface, Pecola’s self-loathing of her own “blackness” seems to be solely a racial issue, but at its core, is also a gender issue.  Everything she does, everything she lives for, is to be pretty.  She only cares about her appearance and how other men see her.  Indeed, she embodies the belief that her abusive father, Cholly, has instilled in her mother, Pauline, that, “She, like a Victorian parody, learned from her husband all that was worth learning—to separate herself in body, mind, and spirit from all that suggested Africa” (The Bluest Eye, ch. 3).  It is seen here how Cholly uses gender-infused racism as a tool against Pauline.  The very notion that Cholly’s wife has “learned from her husband all that was worth learning” is sexist in of itself in that all a woman should lean on her husband for knowledge.  But added into the equation is the fact that Cholly is stripping Pauline of her racial identity so that she is more desirable to him.  So not only is a man valuing a woman purely for her aesthetic appeal in this instance, he is doing so via racial shaming, an unbelievably despicable combination of racism and sexism.  Sadly, this is but one of several examples of female oppression in The Bluest Eye.

In addition to the racial shaming of women, another type of female oppression occurs in The Bluest Eye: that of scapegoating.  In a flashback to Cholly’s boyhood, Morrison describes his first sexual experience with a girl, Darlene, in a field.  When two white farmhands happen upon the young couple, they force Cholly to “keep going,” laughing at and humiliating Cholly and Darlene.  Filled with rage but unable to direct it at his oppressors, Cholly instead turns on Darlene: “Cholly, moving faster, looked at Darlene.  He hated her.  He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much” (The Bluest Eye, ch. 8).  Unfortunately, this type of behavior is not just a one-off exclusive to The Bluest Eye.  Men everywhere often turn on women when they cannot redirect some of their more intense emotions, anger and jealousy to name a few.  The root of this behavior can be traced back to the biological differences between man and woman.  For the most part, men are physically stronger, a trait that, throughout the years, has inherently allowed them more power.  But the age of physical strength defining power is over—as civilized people living in the twenty-first century, humans have no more need for such a behavior.  And yet, women everywhere are often subjected to the wrath of men, for no apparent reason other than that their oppressors can without any repercussions.  This is one of the most widespread instances of the female oppression that exists today, and sadly is one that goes mostly unnoticed.

Ukmina Manoori shines some light on the female oppression that occurs on the other side of the globe in Afghanistan in her biography I Am A Bacha Posh.  Through Manoori’s passionate, yet objective firsthand accounts of living as a man through some of the most tumultuous times in Afghanistan’s history, the struggles that women must endure are graphically detailed.  Long criticized as being home to some of the largest perpetrators of female oppression, Afghanistan is a country deeply rooted in religious ideals.  Indeed, in a society where technology has yet to ease the burden of living, religion has become the saving grace around which Afghans base their entire lives.  For many Afghans, Islam is the beginning and the end, the moral fabric upon which their society is founded.  Unfortunately, as with other religious texts, the Quran is a work open to interpretation, and many groups, such as the Taliban, have used that ambiguity to skew the words of the Quran in their favor.  Coming into power around 1994, the Taliban quickly began using fear and intimidation tactics to enforce Sharia law, a strict, fundamentalist system that severely limits the rights of women.  Manoori, a woman who identifies as a man, describes the fear she experiences under the Taliban: “He saw, understood, and called for reinforcement, a prey of choice, something to serve to the people hungry for blood, a woman to correct, a woman who passes herself off as a man.  He realizes this is worse than adultery, an insult to Allah, guna, a sin; I am a woman to whip, a woman to stone….” (I Am A Bacha Posh, ch. 6).  It is important to see here how the Taliban view Manoori—not as a woman who must inherently be oppressed, but as the very embodiment of sin, a guna.  In this sense, Manoori, and many other women in the Middle East, are victims of religious misinterpretation.  The results of such oppression are arguably some of the most extreme in the world; because Islam is adhered to so fervently by so many, the atrocities that women endure are hardly questioned.  Religious indoctrination is but another example of how women are oppressed in the world today.

Maxine Hong Kingston details some of the struggles that Chinese and Chinese-American women endure in her memoir The Woman Warrior.  Focusing on the relationship with her mother, Brave Orchid, Kingston’s language is eerily reminiscent of verbal storytelling.  Through her haunting descriptions of the struggles that different women have endured, Kingston spins an emotional story that is just as much about her as it is the other women who have impacted her in some way or another.  Most apparent from Kingston’s anecdotes is the pervading sense of masculine superiority in Chinese culture.  Popularly illustrated by China’s one-child policy, sons are largely considered to be much more favorable than daughters in Chinese families.  Thousands of years of tradition have dictated this cultural preference, and though it may be inappropriate in the modern world, it remains, as illustrated by Kingston’s great-grandfather:

“When my sisters and I ate at the house, there we would be—six girls eating.  The old man opened his eyes wide at us and turned in a circle, surrounded.  His neck tendons stretched out.  ‘Maggots!’ he shouted.  ‘Maggots!  Give me grandsons!  Maggots!’  He pointed at each one of us, ‘Maggot!  Maggot!  Maggot!  Maggot!  Maggot!  Maggot!’” (The Woman Warrior, ch. 5).

Such verbal abuse would seem to be absurd to the point of impossibility, and yet, here it is, occurring just several decades ago.  Such mistreatment of women is the product of a conservative culture clinging to some of its archaic principles.  While respecting tradition can be a good thing, people must recognize how patriarchal many of the older ideals of certain societies can be.  Relegating women to an inferior classification is wrong, even if such treatment is based on thousands of years of history.

            In the past hundred years, great strides have been made toward female equality.  Indeed, many women today enjoy luxuries that their ancestors would never have even dreamed of.  And yet, a pervading sense of female inferiority remains in the world.  From racial shaming and scapegoating in rural America to religious oppression in Afghanistan and cultural abuse in China, graphic examples of the mistreatment of women can be found anywhere.  Truly, it is the unifying issue of all human cultures and one that must be corrected, for the day that every woman is really, truly equal to every man, the day that every religion and culture lets go of its archaic, patriarchal tendencies, the world might as well be free and at peace.

With Quotes: 1610

Without Quotes: 1444