Mrs. Kehrmeyer
AP Language, Period 1
27 November, 2016
Patriarchal Control During the age of modernity, our society has been under a patriarchal social system that has oppressed women in all aspects of society. Patriarchal society is something that has been the main concern that feminist have tried to overcome. Someone who has been involved in the realm of feminism is Donald Hall, who wrote in his book Literary and Cultural Theory that“focuses intensely on gender (the social roles performed by the sexes) and explores the complex ways in which women have been denied social power and the right to various forms of self-expression, the man” ( 199). This methodology has led to the creation of feminist analysis, which Hall defines as “ The recognition of the different degrees of social power that are granted to and exercised by women” ( 199). This has changed over the years because of the amount of support for equality for women, which has affected everyday life because women play a key part in the continuous prosperity of society. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there …show more content…
This type of objection to gender system can be seen in “ The Story of Shakespears Sister.” by Virginia Woolf. When Woolf discusses how brilliant Shakespears sister was but “ No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational-for chastity.” This limitation to her abilities is the objection Woolf is trying to make because she believed that men only wanted women for their bodies and not their minds. This type of thinking plays a role in feminist trying to question the gender systems they live