fLesley has 13 post(s)

In the chapter “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women” by Silvia Federici, she talks about how land was managed throughout the centuries. She starts out this chapter with two quotes and the second one talks about how most men viewed women in that time, which was bodies that were just used for reproduction/sexual pleasure  and could careless for anything else. She then goes into the subject about land privatization and how she considers it as  land expropriation through war and religious reform. She explains how it went on for many centuries and locations. Federici also stated how land privatization  was not beneficial, it did not help out the common people. Furthermore into the chapter she starts to talk about the life of the women  and how it changed when land was privatized. Women did not give up without a fight, they participated in enclosure riots were they fought out the fences. Once their land was lost they did end up suffering the most since they were not “capable” of taking up the job that were mainly for men. Women would now have to depend on men under these circumstances. If woman worked for wages they were working for way less compared to the male wages. Federici also puts an illustration in this chapter where it shows women walking with the armies but the women were wearing muzzling devices. This right here shows the degradation of women due to the fact that they had devices on their faces making them feel like they are some kind of animal. Another point were Federici mentions the degradation of women was when she mentioned how the female tongue was considered an instrument of insubordination, meaning that anything coming out of a female mouth was only negative things/wasteful. Throughout this chapter Federici mentions how woman were only important because they carried a womb, most were considered prostitutes/witches/whores, and basically had no social power.

In chapter three of women, race and class by Angela Davis she talks about the events/people in history that took place in the early women’s rights campaign. In this chapter she mentions something that caught my attention which was that there was no black women that attended the Seneca Falls  Convention and the only person with color was a man. During the convention they did not even mention anything about black women, which can tell you that during that time race was still a conflict even between woman that were fighting for equal rights. Integration between women was still an issue at that time. The only colored man that attended that conference that supported woman’s rights had his very own daughter a victim of inequality between black and white women by a principle that was so called an abolitionist women. Just because the principle got one of the student’s parents to object to integrating the classroom, that alone was enough to exclude his daughter. That right there proved that the abolitionist movement still needed to improve in how they deal with racism.

A black woman that Davis mentioned in this chapter, Sojourner Truth, was an important voice in creating change for the equality for black women and white women as well. Davis emphasizes that Sojourner Truth was not afraid to be brave and speak up on how women aren’t as weak as society portrays them, which other woman were too timid to do so.  In Sojourner’s speech “And ain’t I a woman?” she mentions that when she was a slave she did the same amount of labor a man would do and how she performed even better than most of them. Now by Davis stating that Sojourner restates “And ain’t I a woman?”, is Sojourner stating that she is a woman and she was as capable of doing labor that was intended for men and she managed to do even better.  Not only was she fighting for the rights of blacks but also for the rights of women as a whole.

Hello my name is Lesley Ramos and I am a transfer student from Rockland Community College. I am a resident at one of the housing hunter college provides. I picked this class because it was one of the requirements I needed but I took a class already that is similar to this class so I know I will like the topics that we will be learning about. I have yet to declare my major but I am leaning towards biology/chemistry.