Peeps, it's our very first lecture. You can't see me, but you can hear me, and that's good enough. Also, I'm sitting out on my deck recording this, and it's very nice out, but occasionally the wind blows through the trees and makes a little noise, so bear with that. Anyway, so this is our very first lecture.
I'm going to try and keep it short. It's called Methodological Tools, which is a super fancy way of saying... I'm going to describe some terms that you may know and may or may think you know or may not know at all. Okay? All right.
Next slide. Before we go on, you should have looked at the syllabus by now and tried to figure out what was going on there. And this would be much better if we were in class and I could explain the syllabus to you.
But we don't live in that world right now because of the plague. Anyway, the most important thing for you to know is that once you get past this first week, which is an odd week because we're doing the syllabus and some orientation stuff, once we get past this, pretty much every week you'll have these four tasks, which is really three tasks and then emailing me. So you'll always have a lecture.
Well, not the exam weeks, not midterm week and not finals week, but all the other weeks you'll have a PowerPoint lecture like this one that you will listen to and you'll take notes from. Much as you're doing with this one right now. You will also have a reading each week.
The readings are in the modules. You will do the reading, and you will write a reading response. Responses should have summary and analysis, and they should be a full page. There is a sample of notes and a sample reading response in the module section up at the top. So you can go look at those.
Sometimes samples are really handy, okay? Each week you will also have a video response. That is, I'll have a page that says, here's the video assignment, and you'll click that, and you'll do what it says.
It's usually watch either a one longer video or two shorter ones, and make a list, and then you email all those things to me. I want you to email those things to me and not just upload them to Canvas, because I think I can have a more, we can have a more, we can have a kind of an email friendship or relationship or teacher-professor relationship. Student relationship, whatever you want to call it, by email that we can't if you're anonymously uploading stuff to Canvas and I'm grading it without a word to you.
So I want you to email your stuff to me at my Mt. SAC email. You can use the link in Canvas over there on the left that says Inbox to do that. And I will always answer you and tell you I got the stuff. So if I don't answer you, then your email went astray. But it shouldn't.
Okay? So. Again, once we get past this first word weird week, pretty much every week you have a lecture that you need to take notes on, a reading response that you need to write a reading response for, and then a video or two that you watch and make a list of, and then send those things all to me in one email. Try not to send me multiple emails every week, because I'll have 40 some of you, and that's a lot of email. Try and clump all the stuff together in one email and send it all in one go.
If you can't, because you're working on your phone and there's only so much you'll send at one time, that's okay. I just said try, alright? I'm not going to get pissy about this stuff. We have to be nice to each other, alright? Okay, next slide.
There are three terms. I think we're just doing three terms. Gender.
Gender is a word we use a lot in America right now, and I'm not sure we always know what it is. Here's what it's not. Gender is not sex.
It is not sex the noun, it is not sex the verb. Ooh, the verb, you know, sex. We're not going to talk about that now because I'm an old lady and you don't know me and you don't want to talk about sex with me, do you? No!
No, mom, no! Anyway, and sex the noun is your biology. So, for example, I am biologically female.
I have a uterus, I have a vagina, I have ovaries. I used to have female hormones, but now I'm in menopause. Um, etc., etc., right?
So, gender's not your sex. Sex is biology. Gender is about sort of culture and personal choice together. Oh, what else is gender not? It's not a code word that means chicks or women or girl stuff.
Everybody has gender. Women have gender, men have gender, non-binary people have gender, everybody's got gender, and there's not just one or two, there's lots and lots of them. For example, my My performance of womanhood is very different, I assume, from most of your guys'performances of womanhood, because I am a 58-year-old white hippie lady.
with a huge collection of Birkenstocks, and you are not. Right? Okay, next slide. What is gender?
If it's not sex, the noun, or sex, the verb, and it's not a code word for chicks or the babes, what is it? Well, here's the fancy definition. Gender is the culturally constructed set of ideas about womanhood and manhood. And all the stuff in between, okay? I'm not trying to be binary and icky.
These ideas are dependent on culture. So my idea of manly or feminine would be different from a Pakistani's person. Also, it would be different from even a white person 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
So it's also dependent on culture and time and place. Which is the point three here, that gender ideas or gender ideology... Ideology is a fancy word that means a set of ideas.
Gender ideas change over time, which we should know. Right? The notion of sort of what's feminine now or what's female or how a woman behaves now is different from in the past and will change in the future. Also, again, and this is, I can't emphasize, there's not one.
There's not one womanhood and there's not manhood. There's tons of them. That if we were sitting in a classroom right now and we looked around the room, we'd see a lot of different ways to be a woman. And that those are different sort of... versions of womanhood, different gender ideologies.
Sporty girl, a butch girl, old lady professor, hippie girl, etc., etc. And just so the gentlemen in the class do not feel left out, next slide. Womanhood is a gender ideology as well.
That is, the dudes have gender. It's just in this class, most of the time, really all of the time, we don't care. We have literally the rest of your learning experience to care deeply, entirely about men. So let's not do that in this class.
Sorry dudes. No, you don't feel bad. You wouldn't take this class. Anyway, so manhood's a gender ideology as well.
And that there are lots of kinds of manhood. The kind of man my husband is, 62-year-old construction dude, would be very different from, say, Probably one of you guys listening to this lecture, right? So manhood is complicated as womanhood. It is meaningful and valuable as womanhood.
One is not superior or inferior to the other. It's just that this is a women's history class. So when we talk about gender, we will generally be talking about womanhood.
Next slide. The flavors of women. Notice those are all young and thin. Hmm. You young, thin things.
I love you, but still. Next slide. Tinkly old smart-alecky womanhood. That is, there's endless variations of womanhood. Okay?
Gender. So gender's a fairly complicated thing, and a fairly simple thing. As long as we just keep in mind it's not just, like, when you talk about gender, you're talking about girls.
Or it's not about your sex. Because your gender performance could be very different from your sex, right? Right. Next slide.
Patriarchy. Oh, the patriarchy. I've heard the patriarchy is bad.
Oh, what could be worse than the patriarchy? Oh, no, no. What's patriarchy?
Patriarchy, look at, oh, look, here's a definition here. It's kind of a fancy definition. So just, you know. Hold on, let's see what we can do with it.
Patriarchy is the institutionalization of androcentrism. Peg, what's androcentrism? Oh, it means man-centered. You know, like the world. Patriarchy is a cultural system of male domination and privilege which has empowered men to control and limit female possibilities, restrict their bodies, and their lives.
Oh, wow, that sucks. Now, keep in mind that patriarchy isn't We're not here like all the men don't have to cringe and hide. Patriarchy isn't about what individual men have done to women.
And patriarchy doesn't mean, well, patriarchy certainly, certainly creates male privilege. It does not privilege all men equally. Rich, white, old dudes are going to be way more privileged by patriarchy than, say, young, poor.
Brown dudes, right? Yeah. But even young poor brown dudes benefit in a patriarchal society. Because they're dudes. Because patriarchy fundamentally privileges manhood.
And I think that's my favorite way of thinking about it. It privileges manhood. Let's look at the next slide.
So fun things. Oh wait, there's no fun things that patriarchy gives us. Unless you know you're a sexist hater. President type. Hopefully soon to be ex-president type.
A patriarchy gives us unequal pay, that is women are way more likely to be paid less for the same jobs. It gives us the abuse of women and children. It gives us gender roles, which can be both delightful and constraining.
You know, gender roles. You're a girl, so you have to clean the toilets. You're a girl, so you get to wear fun shoes. Those are both gender role things. Objectification, which...
No thinking woman likes. I've known women who are like, oh, I like it when men yell nice tits at me. But you know what?
Most of us don't like it because it's an assault. Unrealistic standards of beauty. That is Patriot Patriot. There's a reason the president rates women on number scale.
Sort of a notion that we're all supposed to look like Melania. We're all supposed to be impossibly thin, impossibly tall. We're supposed to have very white European beauty standards.
Our hair is supposed to be a certain way, our noses are supposed to be a certain way, our butts are supposed to be a certain way. Almost none of us can meet those standards. Rape culture, nothing to like about that.
We've got a rapist in the US Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. That's fun. So if you think rape's still not a problem, you're not paying attention. Male-dominated industries, there's lots and lots of...
Most of the industries that are male-dominated are industries that are still higher paying. There's a reason there's more male engineering... students over at Cal Poly than there are liberal studies students who are the ones who are going to end up teachers.
Because engineering pays a lot more than teachering. Gender stereotypes? Yeah. And stereotypes are bad, almost always. Shaming language?
I don't think I need to explain that to you, right? And negative female portrayals. That is, portrayals in culture of women as sexual beings, as stupid, as weak, as being the object of male gaze, as having no purpose but to serve men, to be desirable, etc., etc.
Okay, that's enough. That's depressing. Third term!
Look at that! So we already have done, look at how we're whizzing through this. We've done, um, oh, I already forgot! We just did patriarchy, and before that we did, oh, gender.
Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Here's our third term, feminism. I like this.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Here's the thing. If we were in class, I would make you guys, I would eventually make you guys all say I am a feminist.
And we may yet do that. We'll see. But here's what I think.
I think all of you already are feminists. But I suspect that very few of you want to claim it. A feminist is just a person, male or female, who thinks that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men.
I would assume there's virtually no one listening to this lecture who doesn't think that. So if you think that, then you are a feminist. And then the question is, why do you not want to say it? Well, next slide.
The right has done a really good job of convincing you that feminists are evil. And it's because the right, the political right, Americans, conservatives, religious, social, and political conservatives have a vested interest in the oppression of women. So what the right has convinced you of is this notion that feminists are bad.
Look at all these bad things. Pat Robinson, what a lunatic. Feminists encourage women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
Wow. Well, no wonder you don't want to be a feminist. Except that's all bullshit. Is that true? I'm a feminist.
I keep my house clean. I can some blackberry jam this morning. I make cheese.
I'm funny. I'm married to a man and a construction man. I am a nice girl and I am a feminist because I believe that women should have equal opportunity and equal civil rights.
And you are a feminist too. Next slide. Feminism beyond that is the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.
That's easy. The advocacy of equal opportunity. Now here's where we get mixed up in America. Oftentimes we assume, this is the other thing we like to do, oh no, what feminists want is us all to be the same.
What a load of shit. Nobody wants you to all be the same. One, it'll never happen. Two, why would you want that?
The girls don't want to be boys, the boys don't want to be girls. Sometimes the girls would like to have the privileges of manhood, and sometimes, ladies, the men would like to have the privileges of femaleness. Like the privilege to not have to pay for your meals. or the privilege to not have to buy your own shiny things.
You want to be an independent human being, women? Buy your own shiny things. Don't sit around waiting for men to buy them for you.
Get a job. Buy your own shiny shit. Here's the thing. Anyone can be a feminist.
Anyone can be a sexist. Men can be feminists. Women can be sexists.
Indeed, some of the most committed and repulsive sexists I know are women. And it's probably because I find it worse in women, because it feels like such a traitor to the sisterhood to me. But I'm an old school feminist, and I take sisterhood seriously. Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm going to.
Anyway, see that? You want equal opportunity for everybody, don't you? You're a feminist. Oh, next term, one more, I think. Sure.
This is a really old-fashioned word, but it's going to come up a lot through about two-thirds of our course. Coverture is the legal principle that women are property. Property.
Yes, let me read that again. A legal principle that women are property, first of their fathers and then of their husbands. That is that women are owned first by their fathers, as old children technically are by the law.
and then by their husbands. The coverture comes from the Latin phrase fem covert, which means woman covered. So a woman is legally covered by her father and then her husband. For most of American history, all women were legally owned for most of their lives. The only time you escaped coverture is you became a widow, because when you married, your father gave up rights to owning you, and then when your husband died, He gave up the rights because, you know, he was dead.
And that left you what we called in American history and in American law, femme sole, woman alone. So you're thinking, this doesn't make sense. And why should I care that women were property? Well, you should care when anyone's property, right?
But still, let's go look at the next slide. So what? To be a thing and not a legal human being.
meant that women didn't have any of the rights of legal human beings. So they were not allowed to own property, which means they couldn't own their own homes or their own businesses. They had no legal rights.
They couldn't vote. They couldn't serve on juries. They couldn't witness at trials. If you're thinking, I don't care about that, imagine for a second not being able to be...
One, if women can't be in juries, if you're a woman and you're a victim of a crime, your jury is not going to have any women on it. And that might be a problem for certain kinds of crimes. If you're not allowed to be a witness to trial and something terrible happens to you, you are not allowed to stand up in front of the court and say, that man did this terrible thing to me.
It makes you, you're, it's bad. And of course not voting is bad because when women don't vote, that means that nobody has to care about what we want. And so men can run the country without caring about... issues that women care about like equal pay and child care and health care and etc etc women couldn't sue for divorce because of course they weren't in charge of anything they didn't even they didn't own themselves and they weren't in charge of the marriage or even had equal participants in the marriage and women had no legal rights to their children now if you're thinking yeah but this is way back machine stuff um that's not at all true my mother Born in 1940 and many of the people in the room, we should, we probably have some students who are my age and maybe even older, who when we were born in the 50s and 60s, women weren't allowed to get, take out, married women weren't allowed to get a car loan.
You had to get your husband to sign for it. They couldn't get credit cards with their husband signing for it. They couldn't, they couldn't get a business loan without their husbands. I mean, they weren't allowed to do anything unless their husband essentially did it for them. And a bunch of this stuff was fixed by the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s and 80s.
So, thank you feminists for all your good things. Okay, next slide. This is fun. Coverture is in wedding ritual.
Notice, I mean, you think about this sort of the classic wedding that so many of you think you want. I'm not for it. I had a wedding, but it wasn't at all this traditional thing. But anyway, your dad walks you down the aisle, and then he gives you, because you belong to dad, he gives you to your husband, who now belongs to you.
You wear white to signify your sexual purity. Your husband doesn't have to because nobody cares if he's sexually pure. And then you promise to love, honor, and obey.
Oh, fun. And then he lifts the veil, your husband. Yes, because you've been married or you're about to be married.
He lifts the veil, which is your symbolic hymen, and he penetrates your sexuality by kissing you in front of everybody, thus claiming his ownership of you. And then, in the old days, the priest would present to the church Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Her identity is now officially gone, and she has given up her name to him. Indeed, that's a classic piece of baggage from Coverture, is the notion that women don't have their own last names.
That, say, I am a Lamphere because, and I am a Lamphere because my dad was a Lamphere. So when I was born... I was given the last name Lamphere in spite of the fact that my mother, who made me out of nothing and pushed me out of her own body, her last name was Hubbard, I became a Lamphere. And then when I was married, if I'd have been a good girl, I would have changed my name to my husband's last name, Burke, but I did not because I am not good. So I stayed Peg Lamphere.
But the notion, all of this wedding stuff, from the dad walking down the aisle to the you can kiss the bride. to you changing your names, all of that stuff, those are all trappings of culture. Now, that doesn't mean you can't do that when you get married, or that if you already did that, that you're a bad person. It doesn't mean any of that.
But I think it's helpful when you participate in these big rituals that we know what they mean. And the meanings behind this one aren't all about romance and delightfulness. They're about ownership. and the oppression of women.
Oh, man, that sucks. Oh, Peg, now I'm depressed. Oh, I was going to be so happy. Look at my dress.
Like, I was going to be so pretty. I was going to make people stare at me for an hour. Okay, you can do that, too. I don't care. Next slide.
Oh, chicks, man. I love the chicks. Don't you love chicks? Aren't chicks hot? Aren't chicks cute?
Chicks grow up to be big and powerful. Alright, that's the end of the lecture. So you've got notes for that.
You're going to send those notes to me. You're going to do your little syllabus assignment. And you're going to do your online orientation assignment. You're going to send those three things to me this week. So I don't mark you as a no-show and drop you from the class, okay?
Alright, peeps. I'll see you next week. Take care.
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