The Second Wave of the Feminist Movement
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It is always important to remember that there are many feminisms, despite bell hook's desire to have one simple definition of the movement. Each of the women represented in The Second Wave has a specific standpoint on many different questions in the field. What would three of these theorists have to say about Carol Gilligan's work if put on a panel to critique it? In the following pages, the intention is to explore the perspectives of Uma Narayan, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Patricia Hill Collins.Brown's emphasis is on the politics of difference which is certainly what Gilligan's work supports. While Brown is looking at the diversity of women's experiences, Gilligan is looking at the difference between men's and women's experiences of socialization and behavior. For Brown, difference is not threatening. Instead, difference provides a way of rethinking culture or reshaping our thinking processes themselves. This is similar to Gilligan's approach. For Gilligan, the problem is not in the difference between men's and women's approaches to moral questions, but in the differential judgment of the value of those approaches. Gilligan noted that her discussion of difference has been an attempt to see difference as a marker of the human condition, rather than a problem. She indicated that one of the problems in thinking about, and theorizing about, difference is that the focus has been on determining what is normative and what is deviant (Gilli
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to see silence, and to speak against it, and outside of it. Her mother did not truly suffer in silence, even though she enjoined Narayan to silence, as appropriate to her role. That is one of Narayan's early experiences of frustration and injustice, that her mother had suffered from being silence, but expected Uma to be silent in her turn.
Gilligan does not describe this in detail. Instead, she noted that girls begin to learn a certain kind of dissociation of their voice from themselves, and that this seems to begin in adolescence. She is describing that loss of voice in terms of the patriarchal culture, although it could certainly be taught in the home.
Gilligan and Narayan seem to coincide in this experience of reality as a crosscultural phenomenon. Narayan contested the accusation that Westernization led her to criticize her culture. Instead, she noted that it was her own personal experience in her own home in her own culture that is the foundation for her criticisms. Those criticisms are similar to those of Gilligan; culture, expressed in home and many other places, socializes women to let go of their experience of self and their unique voice. Culture, whether taught directly in the home by mothers or elsewhere, sile
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1967
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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