Tong-general

So over the course of this week I have been reading out of Tong, and I just have to say that I think that it is a fantastic book. I have never really thought about feminists or if I am one, until that "Hardcore Feminist" reading. This book is helping me realize how many different types of feminists there are in the world. I think that I always associated feminism with the radical feminists description in the book, so it has helped me to read about all the different types.

I have specifically read abouty liberal feminism and marxist/socialist feminism.

I liked the liberal feminism section because it discussed a lot about the history of the feminist movement. It was interesting to see how at the beginning of it when they were trying to get females to be educated like males, some feminists thought that with education females would still the abolition of slavery movement was coupled with women's rights, but the women were asked to downplay their issues so that more people would be attracted to the cause. They did, but there was an upswing in the women's movement after the civil war. In more recent days of feminism, the talked about the organization NOW and how they are a women's rights group. In this group there were lesbians trying to push through their issues, and the group on the whole did not support them because they thought is would discourage people from joining the cause. This is an exact parallel of what happened to women's rights and the freedom of slaves.

The chapter also talks about how they have moved to a more humanistic approach to feminism--meaning that men and women should strive to have both masculine and feminine characteristics. I think that in order for this to universally happen there would have to be huge paradigm shifts; I think that this is a little unlikely and too optimistic. It did not give a clear path to try and achieve this goal, it just said that that's what we should be working towards.

This is why I kind of liked the Marxist/socialist approach better. They gave a lot of clear cut examples about how to integrate women into the workforce and give them equal pay/opportunities. I learned a lot from this chapter. They talked a lot about how alienation plays a role in women's oppression; this has to to with how the woman is always working for somebody else (her man or her children), and not herself.

My favorite line (one of anyway) in the Marxist chapter was "a purely biological solution cannot resolve an essentially psychological problem." This is in response to the technological advances in reproduction and how that will make women equal.

There's so much in these chapters, it is hard to comment on them all, so I'm going to let what I've read digest a little, and then maybe I can think about it more. All in all, I really like this book--it is helping me understand feminism.