‘—

Assignment 3

Jennifer Morgan discusses how women are viewed through multiple travelers that have wrote on their journeys to express the connection between the female body and racism. Some writers believed that women from outside of Europe were quite different like they were pleasant beings but would still degrade them, which made it all the more contradicting. Others sometimes referred these women to be savages and not pleasant to look at. Regardless of what the writers wrote, the women that were examined set how society should be run.

In Vespucci’s passage, there was a woman that really showed beauty to him. He makes remarks of the women’s bodies. In his perspective, their bodies were clean and smooth due to them often washing. The women also never refuse to do any labor while even having children. However, in after all the good remarks he made about the women, he still manages a way to degrade them on their body which can be connected through racism if you further interpret it. When he discusses about their bodies being clean and smooth, he says that they’re still filthy in other ways and have no shame but does not specify it clearly in what terms he was trying to mention. He notices that women are free when it comes to marriage. There was no legal set of rules to how to deal with marriages. A man was allowed to have as many women as he pleased, along with leaving them whenever he wanted with no obligations. These indigenous women were nothing like white women of their gentleness and modesty and were able to do more things, such as working and easier pregnancies.

Black women were able to do labor and far less complications with pregnancies than white women did. They were still degraded on the fact that they were more free than white women were. They could be in any marriages they wanted without issues versus in Europe where religion played a huge role. My question to this passage is, what makes an evolving civilization if women and men cannot make decisions for themselves?