Class Synopsis 4/13

We started today’s class by talking about Virginia Wolfe and A Room of Ones Own, and how in the book Wolfe is saying that all women want is a room of their own. Meaning that they want independence and freedom from being the “other” in the eyes of men. Dr. Layne then want on to connect to A Room of Ones Own to Sex and the City and how Sex and the City and how it shows what would be produced if a women in our society were given a room of her own. In the case of Sex and the City, this ends up being nothing, and the show ends up being sexist because all the independent women in the show want to either be tied to a man. Then we started talking about Alice Walker the author of The Color Purple and her beliefs on black feminism and her criticisms of Virginia Wolfe. We learned that in African Womanism the primary goal isn’t women’s rights but rather African Americans rights, because the opposition of black women comes from both race and class. Walker believed that the fight for race freedom should come before the fight for women’s rights and she disagreed with Wolfe because of this. We then learned about the gaining of voting rights for both women and black people. We learned that when women’s rights groups argued for voting rights for all the government took that as for all men, and gave voting rights to all American men including black men. Women’s rights activists then formed the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, which fought for voting rights for women. NAFWS promised the government that women’s votes would offset the African American vote, and therefore swing the vote back in favor of the white man, thus making suffrage a race issue once again. Over all the entire class was about feminism, and Virginia Wolfe’s A Room of Ones Own