Image Credits- Leslie Sheryll
Introduction
A simple yet powerful essay written by an unassuming professor at Hunter College caught the attention of the feminist, anti-feminist, and misogynoir alike, sedimenting surprise, agony, respect, and rage sailing through the heavy burden of forced piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. It wasn’t just a tribute to feminine suitability in society but also a silent mockery at the attention allotted to matters of varying substantiality, mostly insubstantiality, and the rapid intellectualisation of misogyny. A tactical charm is thrown at ‘her’, who was only looking forward to owning respect, rise, and a repository of other benefits that came with being ‘an ideal wife, mother, and daughter’. The very idea of marriage as a legalised confinement began the day when duchesses were expected to excrete fresh-smelling flowers. It is not an irony but an intensely cruel justification for strangling women’s bodies in tight corsets, bodices, and heavy skirts, as if guffawing as the social pressure of fulfilling ideality turned to tangible clothes, heavy to carry and roam around, let alone run, travel and roll. The proprietorship of bodies was considered sacrilegious and as long as the wife breathed at her husband’s whim, she was tick-marked for a socially agreed-upon existence.
Literature analysis of central metaphors in the essay
The audacity of the then society that survived under stark chauvinism, discussing the roles of the feminine side and dwelling in stereotypes to converge an existence that was pseudo from all sides to assume what a woman needs to sustain was a move bafflingly bold enough to construe surprises. This thesis not only defined the ideal of womanhood but also made it a point to adhere to these ideas. This cult was reinforced by religious sermons and the mid-19th century was found on intensive role division between the two genders. What was more barbaric was that women of color, poor white women, and black women were often excluded from the definition. “Young men looking for a mate were cautioned to search first for piety, for if that were there, all else would follow. Religion belonged to women by divine right, a gift of God and nature. This "peculiar susceptibility" to religion was given to her for a reason: "the vestal flame of piety, lighted up by Heaven in the breast of woman" would throw its beams into the naughty world of men.”
Baffling lines, sadness-inducing definitions, and a confidence-blanching metaphor. All is sane and sundry in this super apt essay on the Cult of True Womanhood as if announcing a didactic apology for being a woman that shagged at the idea of providing even little inklings of equality to women. How far the idea of equality is evident from the aversion to it. In pages beyond discovery, a woman’s sensuality has been taken as a cure for a ‘tough man’s childishness’, because how long would he be able to resist the passional, pulchritudinous, and possessing charms of femininity when all he has to do is prove he is masculine enough by stimulating his wife into believing it’s a sin to ask for rights? Throughout changing eras and traditions, one thing has remained constant: the stature of men and the submission of women. These times are those we live in and ones we beg to live with dignity, a putrescent metaphor.
Image Credits- ThoughtCo
The Young Ladies' Literary and Missionary Report said, "You may labour without the apprehension of detracting from the charms of feminine delicacy." Considered most adequate, a woman was acceptable as long as religion in her personal sphere was a quality to be had, less of a spiritual inclination. If religion was so vital to a woman, irreligion was almost too awful to contemplate. Women were warned not to let their literary or intellectual pursuits take them away from God. While a man could freely come home drunk and beat his wives and kids– all for the virtue and favour of being a man, a woman’s skill sets weren’t her achievements but her ability to induce men to have these milestones. "Man may make himself a brute, and does so very often, but can woman brutalise herself to his level-the lowest level of human nature without exerting special wonder?" Fanny Wright, because she was godless, "was no woman, mother though she be." This phrase strikes a great deal of relevance in the present context as all we expect of women is for them to prove that they have surrendered and succumbed to the best of their abilities as opposed to men proving they aren’t crude and cruel. The fact that a woman’s head still is deemed too big for love and too small for intellect is evidence enough to show that our growth was never acting. An era where ‘thoughtless levity’ leads to assaults is no different than the one where women had to struggle for decades to get basic rights like universal adult franchise. Caroline Gilman's advice to the bride aimed at establishing this proper order from the beginning of a marriage: "Oh, young and lovely bride, watch well the first moments when your will conflicts with his to whom God and society have given the control. Reverence his wishes even when you do not his opinions." This is unignorably relevant to today’s society reeling under the pressures of patriarchy and finding it hard to maintain a gender equilibrium. Then there are the three golden threads with which domestic happiness is woven, "to repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defense, in gentle submission." This is unfortunate insofar as the validity of this argument is concerned. Just like In Bulliet’s ‘Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers’, women in the present social structure are merely puppets, pleasures, and pleaders.
The Story of Lucy Dutton
Lucy was a young, innocent, red-cheeked girl (a metaphor) and as she strode her way through the city, she was encountered by people mad and crazy. He was one such youth, waiting to prance and predate the delicacy of her hymen and have it all to himself. Mentioned as gay, selfish, and profligate, their thoughtless love impregnated Lucy, who was trusting and tempered. The baby soon dies, and Lucy is with her maker now, sad and sombering. What a misery it is to be as such as Lucy, caring and loving.
The essay mentions euphemisms that are too exaggerated to be called so themselves and so does the present, stabbing us in the back, by keeping our dignity as a price to pay for an existence.
Paradox of the present times
What we have today is no different. This issue has been a source of constant confusion and contemplation for me since childhood. In the run-up to targeting gendered norms and discriminatory practices, we have probably overlooked the source of our direct confrontation with this social flaw or evil- as seen in television, mass media, songs, and social setups. Since my school days, following my daily regime of turning on the TV as soon as I came back, I felt the room echo with advertisements in which women were shown promoting detergents, toilet cleaners, diapers, spices, and the like in between cartoons. All of this fixated the question of “Why women?” into my little head. This is something still very evident and has become increasingly normalised. I remember the examples our teachers gave to explain lessons in class, “Your mother will cook delicious food for you now that you have scored so well.”; “Your father might give you money if you insist.” For me, they featured more as examples of misery and a deeply ingrained taboo instead of serving as tools to understand mere words easily, without a bias halting their meaningfulness. A beautiful line of contrast would be men featuring as brand ambassadors while women being brand “commodities”.
Have you ever wondered why ‘Fair and Lovely’ is now ‘Glow and Lovely’? This is probably because the directors have now noticed that caramel shades are also worthy/capable of glowing and a wide majority of females who were dark-skinned accepted themselves enough to ignore the brand. There are copious instances I can quote which have baffled my mind for a long time. Feminine, floral beauty brands have always depicted women as soft, and fair, wearing delicate dresses, as if they were a subject of pleasure for their husbands, while the same brands have launched cosmetic ranges for men depicting them as blue, black, and ‘electrically masculine’ as if a skin problem was the least a man should care about. Not only this, even the most famous reality shows have somewhere validated the idea that it is okay for a stylist to recommend a woman to sit cross-legged, wearing revealing dresses uncomfortably for the entire duration of the show while a man could easily hysterically laugh, jump and make fun of people, and that would still be his reason for winning people’s hearts in the most comfortable costume he likes. This is one irony we all live with.
Women, on the one hand, go through changes at a very young age and hence are technically more prudent and cautious than men, but the same problems have become targeted areas for demeaning and character-assassinating them. Even advertisements selling underarm roll-ons make a WOMAN conscious of the natural processes of her body, not a man, despite going through the same changes. This is something both boys and girls grow up watching and entrench in themselves through generations. These then become sources for a woman to accept domination and a man to impose it. For anyone with keen attention to detail, the cartoon movies we grew up watching and the most famous cartoons have mostly portrayed women and girls as sources of beauty, discipline, culinary skills, and multitasking, with men and boys as harbingers of indiscipline, failure, and argument. While this is burdensome on both genders, the scale inevitably weighs higher on the feminine side.
Conclusion
What we see, shapes our perception of reality and we fail to acknowledge different designs of genders and characters based on that because it becomes a widely accepted mob phenomenon, disrespecting which might compromise our image in the society. What matters is that we have compartmentalised the problem so much that 900 rapes a day don’t mean a mind-boggling statistic to us, when for normal civilisations, they should. What use is rapid economic and cultural growth to us when we have miserably failed to destigmatize the existence of women, let alone stop crimes against them? It is high time these standards change, the world has a new set of challenges every day that are powerful enough to cleave our hope in twain, gender equality is the easiest we should score.
By- Guncha Shandilya
Guncha Shandilya is a 2nd-year History student at Delhi College of Arts and Commerce with an immense interest in ancient architecture and epics. Through writing, she loves to articulate inexpressible thoughts and is on a constant quest for such inspiration. She's also a global climate and SDG4 advocate on various platforms.
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Very well written. Realistic description of women.