A peculiar eclipsing: women's exclusion from man's culture
1978; Pergamon Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s0148-0685(78)91175-2
ISSN1878-2760
Autores Tópico(s)Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition
ResumoIn the kind of society we have, a great deal gets done in words (or other symbolic terms) and on paper. The work of administration, of management, of government, is a communicative work. Organizational and political processes are forms of action in words. I t is an ideologically structured work of action--images, vocabularies, concepts, abstract terms of knowledge, are integral to the practice of power, to getting things done. Further, the ways in which we think about ourselves and one another and about our society--our images of how we should look, our homes, our lives, even our inner wor ldsare given shape and distributed by the specialized work of people in universities and schools, in television, radio and newspapers, in advertising agencies, in book publishing and other organizations forming the 'ideological apparatus ' of the society. This way of organizing society began to develop in Western Europe some 400 or 500 years ago. It is an integral aspect of the development of a capitalist mode of production. Women have been at work in its making as much as men, though their work has been of a different kind and location. But women have been largely excluded from the work of producing the forms of thought and the images and symbols in which thought is expressed and ordered. There is a circle effect. Men attend to and treat as significant only what men say. The circle of men whose writing and talk was significant to each other extends backwards in time as far as our records reach. What men were doing was relevant to men, was written by men about men for men. Men listened and listen to what one another said. This is how a tradition is formed. A way of thinking develops in this discourse through the medium of the written and printed word as well as in speech. It has questions, solutions, themes, styles, standards, ways of looking at the world. These are formed as the circle of those present builds on the work of the past. From these circles women have been excluded or admitted only by a special license granted to a woman as an individual and never as a representative of her sex. Throughout this period in which ideologies become of increasing importance, first as a mode of thinking, legitimating and sanctioning a social order, and then as integral in the organization of society, women have been deprived of the means to participate in creating forms of thought relevant or adequate to express their own experience or to define and raise social consciousness about their situation and concerns. They have never controlled the material or social means to the making of a tradition among themselves or
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