Thursday, October 18, 2007
HW 22 Responding to Virgina Woolf
After reading chapter two of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf I see why she thinks that England is patriarchy. I think that Woolf said the paper proved that England is a patriarchy because it talks about how men always have the power. For example, she talks about how Professor von X has the power to control everything. “ Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor” (pg 33) this quote proofs that many people had believed that the professor was very powerful and they would listen to anything he said. After looking at the New York Times I don’t believe that the United States is patriarchy. When looking at all the articles on the front page there was a huge diversity, from articles about true love to what’s going on in Pakistan. This shows that both women and men have the same say in the United States and there is a freedom of speech.
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Professor Von X is not a real individual, but a way of referring to the many men who hold positions of power (or write about women).
To compare the indicators of patriarchy you have to dig a little deeper. Woolf implies man's dominance is seen in that he was "the proprietor of the paper and its editor and subeditor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the cricketer...He was director of the company...he suspended the film actress..." (Woolf 33-34). Did you look to see what gender the heads of state and ambassadors and company owners and athletes mentioned in the Globe were? Do the representations of men still outnumber those of women in powerful, non-domestic roles? You'd need to say more about the content of the articles to convince the reader that the paper was substantially different today.
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