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B3 W2: Gender and Social Inclusion - Am I that name?

 Riley, D. (1988). ‘The social’, ‘Woman’, and sociological feminism. ‘Am I that name?’ (pp. 44-66)

During the early 19th Century, French women lamented that French men sought to improve their own minds whilst keeping women as simple as possible, perhaps because their fulfilment could only be satisfied at the expense of women.

Women wanted to be educated, but the argument for 'the natural' and 'separate spheres' left them separated and uneducated, "women's natural differences contributed to their fixation within the domestic realm." p.46

'Women' as a concept refers forwards, what will they become, rather than what they are or were.

"The economic assignation of 'women' continued to be uncertain, but their status as elevating agents was simpler and less troubling." p.48

Relates to the Disney Pixar short, 'Purl' which is about a woman who comes into the workplace. It is supposed to show that women coming into an all male space can 'soften' the environment. But the problem is, why does the emotional labour fall on women? Why are the men unable to talk to her until she presents more masculine?

The development of 'the social' created chances for some women to enter work in order to help other women. p.48

"The 'social' does not merely admit women to it; something more constructive than a matter of entry or access is going on; it is as if 'women' become established as a new kind of sociological collectivity." p.50

"So social science might formalize the elevation of 'woman'; women of one degree would act upon women of a lower class, or of a different race, with a consequent moralization of all." p.54

"How 'women' might become candidates for translation from the social to the political sphere depended not only on how 'women' were conceived, but on how the understandings of those spheres themselves were altered." p.55

"Women in the working-class family were solidly buried in the sphere of reform and episodically examined there by socialistic discourses." p.56

"Social policy focused more and more on 'the mother' as it concentrated on the family; she became more accountable for the adequate socialization of her children and the prevention of malnourishment or delinquency." p.58

Asterdorp in the 1930's - a sociological experiment where problem families were moved to a ghetto of rehabilitation.

"To look for comradeship between the sexes at the end of both wars seemed to be more honourable, and lively, than to nurse the corpse of old sexual battles; the vote had after all been won" p.59

"The spectacle of 'women' still demanding rights could be seen as cheaply partisan failures of generosity." p.60

"The fact that 'women' and 'the social' had been so thoroughly folded into each other and rolled up together, had produced impossible consequences for modern feminism as a political philosophy." p.65

"For if woman's entanglement in nature had held her apart from Humanity, so did her newer entanglement in 'the social', since the latter was constructed so as to dislocate the political." p.66

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