Go rest, young woman.

So, I stumbled upon an old article I read on a physician who used to send young men suffering from some anxiety or depression out west to work as a cowboy pretty much in order to strengthen their nervous system, give their mind time to relax, and have good ol' male bonding. However while doing that, he sent 'hysteric' (AKA hysteric or anxious) women to their beds for his infamous 'rest therapy.' An excerpt about the rest therapy is below:

"While men and women could experience the same neurasthenic symptoms, the different treatments they received reflected cultural stereotypes of the day. The Rest Cure ensured that women remained in their “proper” sphere: the home. Mitchell and his medical peers discouraged female patients from writing, excessive studying or any attempt to enter the professions. Mitchell told Gilman, who underwent the Rest Cure in 1887 during a bout of postpartum depression, to “live as domestic a life as possible” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again.” "

However, something that is making me wonder is if these women, who lived in such an environment would have benefited from 'West therapy' like men in those days. I am not sure of this nowadays as well. I am not saying that this reflects on women as a sex, but simply the fact that  gender roles are still relatively strong to this day and women who have been raised into them would dislike the kind of stuff a cowboy would have to do. Although this is only a rough guess and feel free to prove me wrong Overall, the article is very interesting and is worth taking a look at. 

You can find the article here.

A moment of silence for the 'death' of chivalry

As someone who was raised in an old fashioned fashioned family, I was raised with the rules of chivalry ingrained in my head. "The woman should always order first at a restaurant," "Hold a door open for a woman," and"One should always pay for the lady when out with one" are all examples of some of the rules I have picked up throughout my life. I have always viewed this as showing respect and kindness to a woman and I was shocked when I heard that some people regard chivalry as discriminatory. I understand why some rules are sexist and have adjusted accordingly, but does this mean the entire system of chivalry is flawed? I would love to get some female views on this and their takes on chivalry.

Martin Luther and Mother issues.

      In my Psychology of Religion course, we are reading a book called 'Young Man Luther' by Erik Erikson (Very good book, I highly recommend it). The book is a psychoanalytical approach and interpretation of the man Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism and the spark that ignited Protestantism, and his life. One quote made me think of this class. Erikson was talking about Luther's Childhood and how both his father and mother used to beat him and how his father also beat his mother.
      "The Roman concepts of law in [Luther's Father's] time helped to extend the concept of property so that fatherhood took on the connotation of an ownership of wife and children. The double role of mother as one of powerless victim to the father's brutality and also as one of his dutiful assistants in meting out punishment to the children may well account for a peculiar split in the mother image. The mother was perhaps only cruel because she had to be, but the father because he wanted to be." (70)
      This brings up many questions in my mind, such as, should the mother be responsible for beating the child when she might have been forced to in order to preserve her own being? In this role, did the dual nature of mother and servant impact the woman's children in any negative way? What kind of stress might a mother who is in this role be under I really thought that it might be interesting to look at this dual role less from a philosophical standpoint, and more from a psychological standpoint and the kind of harm that not only affects the woman, but the child.

Girls night out.

      So, over spring break I went to visit a friend of mine who goes to Mount Holyoke University, an all girls college out near Amherst, for a couple days. While there, I was probably one of the few non-professors on that gigantic campus with a 'Y' chromosome. It mad me feel out of place, being surrounded by women, like I was in the wrong by being here. This was really one of the only times I have ever experienced being a minority group, and I have to say I disliked it immensely. I started wondering if this is how women feel constantly in a male dominated atmosphere. This was also without anyone actually discriminating on me for being a male. I could not possibly imagine what it is like to be in a place, like in a male centered society, where one is actually discriminated against. It takes a lot to live with that, and to think that women have had to put up with this feeling, and in some cases still do! I imagine the same goes for African Americans, or Asian Americans, or anyone. One feels pressured naturally even if there is no active discrimination occurring. Although I cannot say I enjoyed this experience, I would say that it has influenced how I view other groups now.

The impact of feminism?

So, I just took a look at The Modern Library's 100 most important nonfiction books of the 1900s, and not a single one of them were on feminism (except possibly Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own) . None of the readers chose a book on this topic (And unfortunately seemed to focus on Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard), and neither did any of the judges. This interests me because Professor Silliman once told the class that de Beauvoir's work was one of the most important books of the 1900s. As I contemplate the reason why, I can only come to two possible conclusions on why feminism is so overlooked: The first reason is that the equality, or at least perceived equality of the genders is so obvious to the majority of the individuals that they forget that feminism is a relatively new concept. The other reason I can think of is because of sexism in underestimating the impact feminist authors have made on society.