Rosser/Freedman/Fausto Sterling

All three of the readings included discussion of the particular viewpoints that society has had about women and gender. The chapters in No Turning Back focused on women in the workplace – from the wage gap to the amount of work women have to do every day that isn’t considered to be real work at all. Dueling Dualisms discussed the meaning of gender in different societies and feminist movements, specifically that gender is a social construct, as opposed to sex, which is biological. The Women, Gender, and Technology reading discussed these concepts through the lenses of different feminist schools of thought.

Specifically each of these texts focused on how feminists react to specific issues. In No Turning Back, for example, it is explained that in the Feminist Mystique, which was a book written during the second wave of feminism, an easy solution for women to get out of the trap of staying at home and being forced to do housework was to hire a maid. Of course this did not apply to lower class women, which is something that has become more important to the third wave feminist movement. In Dueling Dualisms, it is mentioned that the second wave feminist movement included an emphasis on the difference between sex and gender with the understanding that gender was a social construction and sex was biological – however they ignored the part where even sex is not clear all the time. The Women, Gender, and Technology reading focused specifically on technology and how it relates to gender and women, especially in the workplace, so there were a lot of countering viewpoints, though they weren’t “waves” but broken down further. The other readings seemed to show that many of the concepts addressed in the second wave were improved by the third wave, but Rosser shows how the different sectors and types of “feminist” all fill in for each other.

I was particularly struck by the concept of Dualisms that was discussed in the Fausto-Sterling reading but also similar to what was discussed in the Freedman book. Fausto-Sterling explained how certain “dualisms,” such as sex/gender and male/female limit the capacity of the concepts to overlap with other other and make it impossible to see that they don’t have to be completely separate. In No Turning Back, Freedman talks about how many societies completely split male and female work and refused to believe that the two could overlap. I think this is because of the male/female “dualism” that exists within many societies. Rosser discusses how these different opinions regarding male/female are thought about in the different feminist theories, and how each one of these theories would have a different opinion on why the wage gap and other statistics regarding gender and the workplace exist.