WOMENST 1A03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Pantsuit, Reproductive Health, Emasculation

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: WOMENST 1A03
• Professor: Wafa Hassan

Document Summary

Women"s education and political activism as harmful to women"s health ad especially reproductive health: Suffragettes and the decline of the race and nation. Suffragettes described or shown not only to be masculine and non maternal but actually animalistic in images- as representing. Notion of male superiority as a reaction to the suffrage movement. The transgression of femininity meant that you were partly male physiologically. It couldn"t be that a women with no penis could be active or strong or smart. The anxiety of that was so much that men felt it more comfortable to descrive these womena s dexual inverts-or in terms we understand as a form of an intersex body. They were more comfortable with physiologically ambiguity than to think that a person with a vagina-that is a women- could be smart and engaged. Sexually intermediate forms expressing the male aspects of their physiology. Linked to anxiety about decline in quantity and quality of population.