Vol. 7 2 / 2002	Soá baùo Xuaân ñaëc bieät
Do hoang Nghia phutavanthu@yahoo.com or nthihoang@aol.com

Response to the readings

Virginia Towne

Divide and separate. ("Teaching the Differences Among Women from a Historical Perspective") In all this talk about women being different from each other I notice the middle class white woman (who seems to be pretty upper class to me) as being the base woman to whom everyone else seems to be compared. No one has mentioned the poor white woman in the south before the civil war, and the Irish domestic in Boston and her sister still in Ireland during the potato famine.

I really believe that a lot this talk of race used in various ways is another way of describing class. Race is handy if you wish to subjugate an entire group of people who are identifiably different from you in the society the subjugation is taking place. However, once you have subjugated them they are of a lower class than people who look like you, and the subjugation of the lower class can be enforced. If we perceive that someone is not as good as we, we look down on them. If we perceive that everyone looks down on us for something, we feel inferior. In a more modern idiom, say to yourselves "homeless" and "welfare mother" and see what images pop into your mind. When you say these words do you see a woman escaping an abusive husband, going to college with a 3.9 average and working up to three part time jobs? My experience is that most people see drug addicted dirty people, perhaps of a different race than the one they belong to.

We as a society are working on all sorts of problems: seeing ourselves as no better or worse than anyone else and allowing people to work to their potential and not some preconceived notion based on gender, race or class. Major problems may be continuing due to over analysis of the differences between us; where do we end in the subdivisions. Each person is different from every other person and has a different perspective based on their own past, their cultural past, and their own uniqueness.

Perhaps the real problem is that we still are not recording the experience of the "secondary" people in our society. The horrible disaster in New York and Washington D.C. last September is a case in point. How many of you have heard the heroism of women police officers, fire department personnel, and rescue workers. Apparently only men with big muscles were present, yet I know there are women in New York and some work for the police and fire department. I heard one mention of a woman iron worker cutting away the debris, but where are their experiences being recorded?

When the history of this incident is read in fifty years, will anyone see women of all classes and ethnic identity as anything besides victims and secondary to the "real" story?

In the past where sources as to the history of subjugated people did exist, they have been discounted. The verbal histories passed down for generations are only accepted if they fit into the conqueror's ideology. Women's books and other writings simply were not important enough to save. This has held true over at least the last two centuries.

Home