HUM 201IH (“Introduction to Feminist Theory and Methodology”)

Instructor: Walter Metz

Fall 2004

Sample Answers to Midterm Exam

Warm-up Questions

1. Is Betty Friedan a liberal or radical feminist? Liberal Feminist

2. Name a film discussed in this class which was interpreted via the framework of “post-feminism.” Mona Lisa Smile, Pretty Woman, Laurel Canyon, Working Girl

3. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s document produced at the 1848 Seneca Falls conference is a parody of what historical document? The Declaration of Independence

4. Women earned the right to vote as the result of what First Wave Feminist movement? The Suffragette Movement

5. In his lecture, Walter connected The Lonely Villa to what television ad? A Brinks Home Security commercial

Identification Questions

1. Anti-essentialism: The belief that there is no necessary connection between biologically-determined sex and culturally-determined gender (2 points). Post-structural feminism is anti-essentialist, while First Wave feminism and some Second Wave radical feminism is essentialist (1 point).

 

2. Combahee River Collective: A group of African-American women who in the 1970s formed out of their discontent with the white, middle-class focus of the Second Wave feminist movement in the United States (2 points). We read their essay, “A Black Feminist Statement,” as an example of Third Wave Feminism (1 point).

 

3. Zillah Eisenstein: A liberal feminist, discussed by Tong in her chapter on Liberal Feminism, citing Eisenstein’s argument with Betty Friedan on the merits of “flextime” (2 points). Tai gave a speech on Eisenstein’s work in our class (1 point).

 

4. (hetero)sex-positive post-feminism: One of Sarah Projansky’s 5 types of post-feminism which is based on a pro-sex, pro-pleasure stance that rejects Second Wave feminism’s anti-pleasure, sex-as-dangerous position (2 points). Walter suggested in lecture that Laurel Canyon’s pool scene, in which Alex kisses her future mother-in-law, is an example of this sort of post-feminism (1 point).

 

5. Shulamith Firestone: A radical libertarian feminist who wrote Dialectic of Sex, and is discussed by Tong in her chapter on Radical Feminism (2 points). Firestone believed in both androgyny as well as the liberating potential for women of artificial reproductive technologies (1 point).

Quotation Questions

1. “And then I think that I wrote most of this in a hospital ward for women, the majority of them elderly, watching my mother for hours and days. There is every conventional reason not to mention that here and no real reason why I shouldn’t. It had something to do with admiration and is at least a possibly real ending.”

 

This is the last moment before the “Afterword” in Stephen Heath’s essay, “Male Feminism” (2 points). Heath believes in “admiration” as the proper stance for men’s relationship to feminism, which Heath believes is an “impossible” one. In the Afterword, Heath even suggests that he shouldn’t have mentioned his mother in the article at all, suggesting that this was another form of male colonization of women. Walter identified more with Michael Awkward, who says that men should just get to doing the work of feminism (2 points).

 

2. “The Searcher would do well to wonder about these ‘unparalleled opportunities,’ particularly in the light of Rich’s analysis of the conditions in the Vienna Lying-In Hospital in the nineteenth century. As she points out, there is testimony that in the 1840s the mortality there from ‘childbed fever’ was so high that women were buried two in a coffin to disguise the rate of death.”

 

This is from the beginning of Mary Daly’s piece on the American gynecological establishment, excerpted from her book, Gyn/Ecology (2 points). Daly writes from a radical feminist position in this essay, suggesting that male doctor’s abuse of women’s bodies transcends historical boundaries, from this awful 19th century hospital in which the doctors were so arrogant as to not wash their hands, to Nazi experimenters, to modern American gynecologists (2 points).

 

3. “I think here of the kaleidoscope I used to play with as a child, and the delight I took in bringing together hundreds of chips of colored rocks into a single beautiful pattern—only to break that pattern and bring together an even more beautiful one. As I grew older, I no longer played with my kaleidoscope. The ephemerality of its patterns increasingly distressed me as I learned about the good, the true, the beautiful. But today I no longer view ephemerality as a problem because I no longer quest for the meaning of life. Rather, I understand that change and growth are necessary to life and that what makes feminist thought liberating is its vitality, its refusal to stop changing, to stop growing.”

 

This is from the conclusion to Tong’s book, Feminist Thought (2 points). Tong advocates the belief in feminisms, rather than feminism, in order to show the use value of many types of thought for the goal of liberating women’s lives. She here uses the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to make her point (2 points).

 

4. “Reading Freud made me just as skeptical about penis envy. The power of giving birth makes ‘womb envy’ more logical, and an organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men very vulnerable indeed.”

 

This is from the Gloria Steinem piece, “If Men Could Menstruate” (2 points). Walter spoke in class of the feminist science studies scholars, like Evelyn Fox Keller, who believe that male science, like the development of the atomic bomb, also occurs as the result of what Steinem here calls “womb envy” (2 points).

 

5. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.”

This is the opening line of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (2 points). This comes from the chapter “The Problem That Has No Name”: at the time of publication, many women’s discontent with middle-class housewifery was felt but not expressed. A number of scholars have labeled Friedan’s book the most important of the 20th century because it gave voice to this widespread discontent with patriarchal values (2 points).

Short Answer Questions

1. Briefly explain the differences between the discourse of True Womanhood and the discourse of New Womanhood. Then, use these terms to explain BOTH a) Susan Glaspell’s Trifles AND b) the clip from “Sex and the City” that I showed in class. In other words, are these characters True or New Women? Why?

 

The discourse of True Womanhood, a set of Victorian values commonly accepted at the turn of the 20th Century, posited that women were the proper repositories of moral goodness. Their proper role was in the home, reading the Bible to children. Men, on the other hand, were contaminated by the dirty corruption of the public world. It was thus women’s job to re-purify these dirty men at the end of the day (5 points). The discourse of New Womanhood is usually associated with the Suffragette Movement, advocating women who ventured out into the public space. By the 1920s in the United States, the New Woman was one who went out at night on dates, smoked cigarettes, had her own job, etc. (5 points). Trifles is a play that advocates True Womanhood—these farm wives are clearly not radicals—but also suggests that True Women are smart enough to recognize when one of their own has had enough with it and murdered her own husband. The True Women in Trifles solve the murder when their husbands, who know nothing about the domestic space, and indeed do not care to know anything about it, cannot (5 points). In the vibrator shopping scene from “Sex and the City” that I showed in class, Samantha is a quintessentially New Woman. She indeed has the power in the public space to challenge men’s definitions of items for sale. While the salesman at the Sharper Image refuses to call the neck massager a vibrator, she turns to the other women in the shop, who are clearly there to buy vibrators, not neck massagers (5 points).

 

2. Briefly explain the differences between a libertarian and a culturalist radical feminist. Then, briefly show how these differences produce alternative radical feminist analyses of, choose one, a) pornography, b) androgyny, OR c) rape culture. Then, apply these discussions to EITHER a) True Lies OR b) A Question of Silence. Is the film you have chosen a libertarian or culturalist film? Does libertarian or culturalist feminist analysis help you intepret the film?

 

Both forms of radical feminism believe that liberal feminism is inequipped to deal with the sorts of problems women encounter in patriarchal culture. However, a libertarian feminist would argue for a wide range of free choices for women. A culturalist feminist would worry that such choices are not freely made, and would be more interested in fixing the systemic nature of women’s oppression (10 points). The clearest contrast is regarding pornography. The culturalist radical feminists—MacKinnon and Dworkin—worked hard throughout the 1970s to ban pornography because it represented the typification of the sex-as-dangerous radical feminist position. Libertarian feminists would suggest that women be allowed to make their own choices regarding pornography, so long as people were not being actually abused in the making or consumption of it (5 points). I think A Question of Silence is a culturalist radical feminist film. It argues that the only response women have to the male-dominated judicial system is refusal to participate. There are no libertarian possibilities for choice in these women’s lives. A Question of Silence seems to be advocating the massive overhaul of the social judicial system, clearly a radical position, but also a culturalist one in that it sees women’s lives being devastated by its overall unfairness (5 points).

 

3. The feminist work of Susan Faludi has appeared at numerous times in Walter’s lectures and in the reading material for this course. What importance do her two books, Backlash and Stiffed, have for feminism in general? How do the differences between these two books bring into focus the history of feminism in the United States over the past 25 years or so? Would Faludi consider herself to be a post-feminist? Would you consider Faludi to be a post-feminist? In whose sense of that term?

 

Susan Faludi’s Backlash was a book written in the 1980s that documented the ways in which the Reaganite neo-conservative revolution worked against the progress of the women’s movement from a decade before. One example of this is the neo-conservative blocking of movement toward the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. In Backlash, Faludi claims that the neo-conservative movement IS post-feminism, an attempt to make feminism go away by declaring it dead (8 points). Stiffed, written in the late 1990s, is a book that seems to differ quite profoundly from Backlash: it is interested in the ways that men have been deeply wounded by consumer culture. However, toward the end of the book, Faludi indicates that feminism is indeed the solution to these men’s problems, in that they have been “ornamentalized,” that is converted into objects to be looked at (7 points). Walter indicates in his essay on The Graduate that, because of its focus on masculinity studies, Stiffed could very well be seen as a post-feminist work in the productive sense of that term, where post-feminism indicates feminist paths that traditional feminists did not pursue, such as masculinity studies. Thus, Faludi could be  both seen to be a critic of post-feminism (in Backlash) as well as an exponent of it (in Stiffed) (5 points).

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This page was last updated on October 8, 2004

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Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theater Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman