14
Feb
2008
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"This is America not Saudi Arabia"

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“The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying. This is America not Saudi Arabia” that is what the editor of Vogue magazine Anna Wintour stated on learning why Hillary Clinton decided not to appear in Vogue magazine for fear of looking too feminine.

Now.. Does being mannish relate in any way to Saudi Arabia? Or is mentioning Saudi Arabia in every statement that associate demeaning and degrading women a norm these days!

Let me go back a bit through feminism history in the west and America to explain that women had to look like men to be taken seriously not too long ago, so as not to be perceived as sexual objects. And from what I gather, some women like Senator Clinton believe this is applied still in the 21st century, not in Saudi Arabia but in the United States of America!

Feminism became an organized movement in the 19th century as people increasingly came to believe that women were being treated unfairly. (So as you can see, women were dehumanized and marginalized in the west before the feminist movement). The utopian socialist Charles Fourier coined the word feminisme in 1837. As early as 1808, he argued that the extension of women’s rights was the general principle of all social progress.

In the nineteenth century, concerns were all linked by a single element: clothing, which accentuated, reinforced, and promoted gender difference. Fashion determined that the female image should have aesthetic sensibility, physical delicacy, and womanly grace. These qualities had negative consequences for women who wished to vote, obtain higher education, or work. Aesthetic sensibility translated into a preoccupation with silly frills, and other non-essentials, it lead to the view of women as light-minded creatures.. (Just a reminder, women were perceived this way in the WEST).

Women’s physical delicacy, a myth due in part to the physical constraints of women’s fashion by forcing women’s bodies into unnatural contours, corsets often caused the uterus to prolapse. This complaint became so common that “pessaries” (a device to hold internal organs in place) became a regular yet unmentionable fashion accessory. Additionally, corsets not only forced ribs to grow directly into the lungs, but also weakened the spine preventing any sort of strenuous activity, physical or mental and was used as an argument against female higher education. Imagine that!

Of course, without advanced training, women were effectively barred from any lucrative profession. Fashion forced women to remain in the domestic sphere, the ideal frame for their natural grace and moral superiority. It is no wonder that feminists such as Annie Denton Cridge argued for dress reform which blurred gender difference; it was the first step toward increased political, educational, and occupational opportunity for women.

Proper young girls remained inside homes sewing or playing with dolls, while young men were free to engage in physical activity and play outdoors. Proper young ladies were trained to enjoy “feminine” pursuits to help them acquire a husband and the financial security he would bring.

Women had to be frightened away from specific medical training or any training which could draw them away from domestic work. This need to keep women in the home generated article after article, and book after book, all proving *scientifically* that female education was directly linked to female illness. Dr. Clarke noted cases of young women who graduated from school or college with undeveloped ovaries. Later they became sterile ! gynecologists such as Dr. William Goodell stated definitively that “female boarding schools and public schools … breed a host of sickly girls” plagued by “manifold diseases, both functional and structural” including “neuralgic pains,” “irregular menstruation,” “spinal irritation, irritable bladder, painful ovaries, and various pelvic aches and congestions”. The famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell argued that intellectual work is “dangerous” for women, “sexually incapacitative to a varying amount,” and the cause of “hysteria, or hysterical hypochondriasis”. Sir James Crichton Browne declared in the medical journal Lancet that education causes women’s brains to consume themselves, resulting in “nervous disturbances, insomnia, anaemia . . . general delicacy,” and “anorexia scholastica”.

Women also such as Miss M. A. Hardaker, argued in 1882 that since the male brain is larger than that of the female, one can establish “an exact correspondence between brain-substance and intelligence,” since “in the case of every other organ of the body we know there is an ascertainable correspondence between size and condition, and the amount of work that an organ can do”. Just as larger heart will pump more blood than a small one, a larger brain will pump more intelligence. Eliza Lynn Linton pointed out that education took both a moral and physical toll on women: it not only made women “arrogant, pretentious and vain” “It ruined them for pregnancy, lactation, and child rearing”. She condemns the young intellectual woman who selfishly risks her reproductive organs.

The desire to educate or support oneself was not a noble effort, but an indication of hormonal deficiency. Either one was a “womanly” woman, whose happy ovaries generated a healthy maternal urge; or an unnatural “mannish” female, whose natural instincts had been perverted into a craving for “public applause, an audience, excitement, notoriety”. Lacking the warm love and validation provided by a husband and children, such failed women could only hope to be “lecturers, professors, entitled to wear gowns and hoods, and put letters after their names”. They are more to be pitied than despised, since their personal ambition exposes their deficiency of womanly grace and force.

That is how women were perceived in America in the 19th century. Women then have gone through the 1st, 2nd and 3rd wave feminism since the 1800s to the 1990s to reach where they have today, and yet some still worry that they look too feminine to be taken seriously!

Give us Saudi’s a break.. we women have only just started to go to schools in 1964! We still have a long way to go but we are heading towards the right direction.
A note to remember, Women were never perceived as a lesser being than man in Islam unlike some other cultures.