Tag: feminism
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Mary Putnam Jacobi, advocate for women in society and medicine
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906) was born in London to American parents. She spent her childhood and adolescence in New York, where she studied pharmacy before receiving her medical degree in Philadelphia in 1861. In 1866, after briefly working in Boston with Marie Zakrzewska,1 she went to Paris to further her medical training. Back in New…
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What’s hormones got to do with it? The medicalization of menopause in postwar America
Pavane GorrepatiIowa City, Iowa, United States Introduction From menstruation to menopause, there appears to be a deliberate and constant medicalization of the stages of a woman’s life. Menopause, a biological process every woman experiences, has been cast in a negative light, a time to be wary rather than to be celebrated. This has led the…
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, apostle of women’s liberation
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote much about the state of women in society, publishing the still widely acclaimed short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). She also wrote other essays, somewhat colored by her own life experiences. Her father had left his family when she and her brother were…
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A story of the oppressed
Donia KhafagaCairo, Egypt Writers often use their novels as a social commentary to criticize a certain cultural context and advocate for change. Today women are still trying to attain equality and freedom. In many Arab countries, men are endowed with freedom and opportunities while women remain silenced and marginalized. One of the most notable authors…
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Feminist epistemologies in A Woman Under the Influence
Heather StewartLouisville, Kentucky, United States In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrative presents a woman presumably driven to the point of insanity by her gendered social role and restriction to the domestic sphere. This story represents a fictional account of the problems of pervasive and unchallenged gender norms, problematic gendered…