Here’s a line from Meredith Tax’s pamphlet on the damage that American society does to women:
We have to face the fact that pieces have been cut out of us to make us fit into this society.
You can read Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life over a single cup of coffee. It’s a quick, clean expression of outrage at the destructiveness of American society.
It twists women into shapes that are barely recognizable as human beings. It does that to African Americans and to minorities of all kinds.
American society also, in the way it socialized boys, turns out men who are missing pieces of themselves:
The ideal American male, in terms of the dominant values of our society, is a competitive machine, competent, achieving, hard-driving, and soulless, with a sexual life, but not personal life. Fortunately, most men can’t live up to this ideal; but the strain of trying is considerable.
Woman and Her Mind was published 52 years ago. Things have changed.
But this society still does harm on a scale that is barely imaginable.
Meredith Tax died recently at 80. I saw her obituary in The Washington Post and looked up her famous essay.
• Sources: Meredith Tax, Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life; New England Free Press, 1970. This essay originally was published as a pamphlet and then appeared, edited, in books. Tax’s restored the text at her website, https://meredithtax.org. But note the better URL in Michael Leddy's comment.
The Washington Post’s obituary is here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/29/meredith-tax-feminist-author-dead/
It looks like someone has already grabbed the url, which now goes to a page about cryptocurrency. But the essay is here:
ReplyDeletehttps://meredithtax.org/singlewriting.php?id=39
Thanks, Heber.