I wouldn’t care if i lost the ability to use my phone. I have never been big into the “nonsense news craze” by this i mean that people are constantly telling other people everything they do of do every minute of every day
When I left class yesterday, I began having several musings, which I plan to put into blog posts in the next several days. I will start with Self-Reliance.
Self-Reliance is a very old concept but really was discussed in detail as an important part of life when R. W. Emerson wrote an essay on it. I really love Emerson and I especially love this essay. Even though he is mostly referred to as an essayist, I see him as a philosopher.
Yes, his language is dated and so when he talks of people in general and humanity as a whole he uses the terms “man”, “men’s”, and “mankind”. However, it is easy to look past this.
Most people know what it means to be self-reliant. For those who do not know, to sum up, it means one must be able to take care of oneself without the help or aid of anyone else. Now for Emerson’s friend Thoreau, he took this literally, believing that everyone should go off on his\her own, which is what he did. However, Emerson was not against relationships as much as Thoreau was. In fact, Emerson believed relationships were important and that it is okay to be co-dependent or interdependent, so long as, that, at the end of the day, if that other person were to disappear, one could still take care of oneself. This philosophy obviously gets rid of the problem of slaves quiet easily. However, what does this all have to do with women?
I believe is self-reliance and its core message and at its core it focuses on egalitarianism (if you really think about what Emerson says). The best way to explain is to focus on marriage.
Even in Emerson’s time (late 19th-early 20th century), we all know that marriage was still important and expected—more so in the case of women. Let’s look at a hypothetical:
Let’s say you are a woman, and you have been nurtured to be prissy and ditzy. What happens if you don’t or can’t get married and can’t rely on daddy’s money any more (this scenario is taking place in Emerson’s time just to be clear)? Can you split a log? Provide for yourself? Manage your finances? Etc. Let’s now assume you are a man in this situation. Can you sew your coat or shirt back together? Can you prepare a meal that is not just some camping\cowboy feast of grits and beans? Etc.
I know I am playing with real obvious stereotypes her but you get the point. Take this to the modern world: regardless of your sex or gender, you should be able to (get ready for more stereotypes) fix a flat tire, check the oil in the car, chop wood, mow the lawn, start a fire, and stitch\sew, clean dishes, do laundry, cook\bake a multitude of things, talk to your son and\or daughter about sex and their body changes. You should be able to put up a fight and defend yourself and also be there to comfort and console the people close to you.
In addition, today the best and most obvious examples of people who are in situations in which they are self-reliant in several of these ways are single parents.
The logical conclusion from this experiment is that all the tasks I listed are things one can learn which means they are not gender or sex exclusive one way or another.
Therefore, these stereotypes are fully unfounded and that the sexes and genders are equal obviously. (That is where the egalitarianism comes in).
I know this all seems rather obvious but as I said, I am a big fan of being self-reliant. Ask yourselves if you are self-reliant. I mean this not judgmentally, but that for one reason or another that do not necessarily relate to sex or gender, you may not be skilled in all the areas I listed. For example, I cannot sew and I plan to learn. It is not because I am male that I never learned, I just never needed to because I always had someone to do it for me.
I agree, you should be able to do anything that would make you more self-reliant.
ReplyDeleteTwo notes though: 1. No single person is entirely self-reliant. We aren't meant to be hermits, after all. We are (for the most part) social creatures with social needs and we can't do everything ourselves. We could survive, I suppose, on our own, but as it is, with lives we live, we cannot do that all on our own.
2. People are moving away from being able to do anything by themselves, gender-specified or not! We are unlearning all the basic skills as a group. My favorite example: fresh-persons who come to the dorm the first time and have never touched a washing machine or changed their own sheets once in their entire lives. I do think this comes from a gender-neutral coddling of American children these days....