Backwards and in High Heels: In Defense of the Gender

“Don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards . . . and in high heels!"
-- Bob Thaves

The experience of one given group of people cannot be accurately recorded unless one of their own does so. A person can be as close as they want to any group they want but until they are one of them, fully immersed in the scene, there is no way to truly know. Until a day is spent as an alcoholic, who can say what it is like? Until a day is spent as a Bohemian or “starving artist” who is to say that shoplifting paintbrushes is a crime? Until a day is spent as a woman, who is to say that they are irrational, absent-minded or “prone to fits of hysteria”? Literature by women about women is a relatively recent development, and it is one that has spent centuries attempting to dispel biases and prejudices. In the last two centuries women have gone from accessories to assistants to passive heroine to active heroine to anti heroine to everything else in between. Sometimes the phasing from one type of power to the other is called evolution. Sometimes the campaigning for this evolution is called feminism. Critics say that the most well-known (or at least widely taught) short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a work of extremely feminist literature and speaks out against the sexual biases of the medical profession at the time. The women in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” represent a variety of socio-economic classes, and in turn a variety of views about their own roles.

Taken from the opening paragraph of a paper I wrote last summer on a porch. Arbor Mist could have been involved.