The Intimately Oppressed Summary

Howard Zinn - The Intimately Oppressed

In the article “The Intimately Oppressed” Howard Zinn follows the historical backdrop of women's roles from the colonial period to the Civil War, contending that women were one of many in the United States, along with whites, African-Americans, and Native Americans, that endured oppression during this period.

Zinn claims that women were appointed a "special status...something akin to that of a house slave in the matter of intimacy and oppression, and yet requiring, because of that intimacy, and long-term connection with children, a special patronization, which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into treatment as an equal” (Zinn, 2010). Woman were the ones that were intimately oppressed. History has put woman on a platform but has also disparaged them to not exactly their value. Women were loved and abused yet they were systematically oppressed through law and religion.

An influential periodical titled The Spectator invaded the America with patriarchal views of. Men thought of themselves as both king and priest. Therefore woman were seen as inferior because of religion, childbearing abilities, and an idea that women were simply built to be dependent on men. Reverend John Cotton a powerful church father from Boston said, “ . . . that the husband

should obey his wife, and not the wife the husband, that is a false principle. For God hath put another law upon women: wives, be subject to your husbands in all things"(Zinn, 2010). Men created these beliefs, and women were trained to believe them.
Zinn’s article was very raw, there was an excerpt from a slave trader that stated: “I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed......packed spoon-fashion they often gave birth to children in the scalding perspiration from the human cargo. ... On board the ship was a young negro woman chained to the deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was purchased and taken on board”(Zinn, 2010).
Throughout “The Intimately Oppressed” article there were mentioning’s of things that a woman could not do and that was vote and own property. A woman was allowed to work but when she did her wages were 1/4 to 1/2 what men earned in the same job, and at times all of a women’s earned wages were given to her husband. Women were also excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, and from the ministry.
In summary, we can say Affirmative Action is working and the things that are described in this article seem unfathomable, but they occurred.

Affirmative action is necessary and is changing. Woman are allowed to vote, they can own their own home, and they can earn the same amount as a man if not more. Woman are also allowed to be lawyers, doctors, and involved in ministry. How could one not agree that Affirmative Action isn’t necessary with all these changes? I guess if an individual believed that Affirmative Action should be terminated…they probably wouldn’t be a minority or a woman behind the computer screen, just some food for

thought!
Zinn, H. (2010). The Intimately Oppressed .A People's History of the United States. Retrieved from: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnint6.html

Sojourner Truth - Ain't I A Woman?
Sojourner Truth gave her “Ain’t I A woman speech in 1851, at the Woman’s Convention in Akron, Ohio.
Sojourner Truth didn’t bite her tongue for anyone in the crowd the day she stood up and took a stance, she was the lone African -American woman, the only voice for women like herself at the meeting. Truth was not one of the invited speakers; she came forth on her own volition. Her assertion called for the recognition of dignity, respect and equal justice for all women. But Truth’s assertion also revealed the contradictory, unequal status and treatment among White women, African- American women, and African-American men. Truth told the crowd that she could do the work of a man. She quickly reminded them that she also doesn’t receive the treatment the men do even though did does things that they couldn’t (Truth, 1851). In this speech she made it known that Black women are generally treated differently than other women.
In broken up English, Truth expressively pointed out that the only way that Christ came into existence was through a woman. She mentions that Mother Eve was powerful enough to change the world by eating the apple. If one woman could “turn the world upside down all alone” than women as a collective should “be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!”(Truth, 1851).
In summary, Truth’s speech is a testament to how the implementation of Affirmative action policies has played a major part in opening up the doors for women and minorities to start to take their rightful place in society. Equal opportunity for women is still a progressing and will be for many years to come. Abolishing or curbing Affirmative action would not only halt the forward advances that women, as well as minorities, have been able to achieve; it would mark a huge step in the wrong direction in the nation's journey towards equal opportunity for all. If we allowing Affirmative action to continue we will only see significant changes from woman and minorities in the areas of educational advancement, social gain, and lastly economic gains.
Truth, S. (1851). Ain’t I a Woman?. Retrieved from: http://www.sojournertruth.org/Library/Speeches/AintIAWoman.htm

Virginia Woolf - Shakespeare’s Sister
In the piece “Shakespeare’s Sister”, Woolf emphasizes the fact that women are treated unequally in her society and that this the reason they have produced less impressive pieces of writing than men. To illustrate her point, Woolf creates a fictional character named Judith Shakespeare, the wonderfully gifted sister of William Shakespeare (Woolf, 1929).
Woolf utilizes Judith to show how society systematically oppresses women. William Shakespeare was portrayed as audacious, inventive, and eager to see the world. Judith was underestimated and deemphasized to say the least. Judith had no chance of learning language structure and rationale nor would she ever get the chance to read Horace and Virgil. Judith was cautious when she wrote and often hid her pages or set them on fire. The Shakespeare’s were good parents who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter (Woolf, 1929).
Denied of the material conditions in which understand her gift, she was driven to suicide. The point that Woolf was trying to make in “Shakespeare’s Sister” was that even a woman as gifted as Shakespeare could never have made such progress. Ability is an essential component of Shakespeare’s success, but since women are treated so differently, a female Shakespeare would have fared quite differently regardless of the fact that she'd had as much ability as Shakespeare did. Woolf insists that Judith’s spirit still lives, “for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh” (Woolf, 1929).
In summary, Woolf used her fictional powers as part of portraying the difficulty of Shakespeare's sister. Woolf first points of interest all the factors that aided Shakespeare's natural genius. Judith, conversely, is victimized by a number of socioeconomic factors. If only Affirmative action was around when Judith was going through theses trying times, things may have had a different outcome. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures Affirmative action is more of a methodology than just an admissions policy. Colleges and universities reach out to groups that are underrepresented and urge students to apply. Institutions frequently offer financial aid to underrepresented students and provide on-campus support programs to enhance their scholastic achievement (NCSL, 2014). This achievement would have given Judith the opportunity to walk amongst us.
National Conference of State Legislatures. (2014).Retrieved from: http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/affirmative-action-overview.aspx
Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One's Own. Retrieved from: http://www.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/psych214/woolf.room.html

Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers - Men Are From Earth, and So Are Women. It’s Faulty Research That Sets Them Apart.

In the article, “Men Are From Earth, and So Are Women. It’s faulty”, written by Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers, the contrasts between men and woman are reassessed and tested. According to Rivers and Barnett, there is truly no inherent contrast between the genders, there are just differing behaviors controlled by the power men and lady are given in a specific circumstance(Barnett, Rivers,2004).
Research studies that have been performed report out that size of effects indicate that the variances between the sexes are insignificant or trivial on a host of personality traits and cognitive and social behaviors (Barnett, Rivers, 2004).
Carol Gilligan, a University psychologist at New York University put out a new description for women's lives that hypothesized that women have a unique, caring, nature not conveyed by men in the early 1980’s (Barnett, Rivers, 2004). Anne Alonso, a Harvard psychology professor and director of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at Massachusetts General Hospital, was disheartened by the fast pace at which Gilligan's ideas have spread into psychotherapy that is taught to people in society. Alonso said “The idea of a relational self, she charged, is simply an "idea du jour," one that she called "penis scorn." This meaning that men are considered worthless or despicable (Barnett, Rivers, 2004).
The undeniable biological differences between men and women is utilizes as rationalization, by society, to force people into social roles that limit and shape their outlook and conduct. It seems that society can’t be content with the natural characteristics that differentiate men from women, but everyone insists on assigning their own ideas of what and how a man and woman should be including the authors from this article. The physical distinction some way or another becomes matched with psychological qualities. It’s not enough for a man to simply be a man; he must also be masculine, and a woman, feminine. Instead society looks at a “man “with a beautiful “woman” on his arm as living up to a cultural and social standard (Barnett, Rivers, 2004).
The issues that have been reassessed and tested and are lacking proof are “ embedded in the curriculum of courses in child and adolescent development, moral development, education, moral philosophy, feminist pedagogy, evolutionary psychology, gender studies, and the psychology of women”(Barnett, Rivers, 2004).
The issue here is that many students don’t have the ability to research truthfulness of the claims on their own, and why would they…these ideas resonate with cultural zeitgeist, therefore students have no reason to do so. The essentialist point of view has shaded the dialogue about the sexes that there is little room for any story other than difference (Barnett, Rivers, 2004).
In summary, men are taught to accept that they are lacking in caring and compassion, while women are directed to accept that they are intrinsically unsuitable for competition, initiative, and technological professions. There is minimal empirical support that exists for essentialist ideas like Gilligan’s. In society, while many expectations of men and women are still current, many have changed and will continue to change for generations to come supporting affirmative action being continued with changes.
Barnett, R. C. & Rivers, C. (2004). Men Are From Earth And So Are Women. It's Faculty Research That Sets Them Apart. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(2), B11. Retrieved from: http://www2.psychology.uiowa.edu/faculty/harvey/Men_are_from_Earth.pdf