Monday, September 2, 2013

self introduction-Bethany Nelson


Hi everyone!

I’m Bethany Nelson, and I’m a junior here at Fredonia.  I’m studying Public Relations with a minor in English.  I’m originally from Jamestown, NY.  My hometown is really special to me and I really love how going home is just a 40 minute drive down the road!  I’ve been swimming competitively since I was 11, and after taking a year off of swimming my freshman year here, decided to join the swim team here for my sophomore year, and absolutely loved every second of it! Most people don’t understand why I love swimming so much, and for the most part neither do I, but I just go with it!  I swim distance freestyle events, so my races are the super long ones that no one ever wants to watch…or swim.  Besides swimming I really love my family.  I have a huge family; I have 6 members of my immediate family and a total of 40 cousins on both of my family.  My family are some of my favorite people in the world, and I dont know what I would do without them.  I really love reading, basically anything, but I’m a sucker for love stories.  I’m obsessed with Pinterest, quotes from Pinterest, and trying to make my life look like it belongs on their website.  I’m a self diagnosed coffee addict, but I have no intention of trying to change that... :)

I was interested in taking this class not only because it fits a requirement for my minor, but also because the idea of taking a class solely on women writers sounded fascinating.  I’ve always found classes that are focused on a specific topic to be a really cool way to learn about that topic.  Instead of rushing through women writers as a section in another class, I thought it would be exciting to spend a whole semester studying them.  This class will also be entirely different than any class I’ve ever taken before, and I’m excited to study just women writers this semester!

As Miller said on page 2 “Because women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin, institution, production that men have had, they have not, I think (collectively) felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cognito, etc.”  I think that this is a very interesting opinion of a woman during this time period to have.  If I were to have read it and not known who had written it, I would have assumed it was a man.  I wouldn’t consider myself an active feminist, but that doesn’t mean that hearing about people say that we make a big deal about nothing doesn’t hit a nerve.  Honestly, reading it made me a little upset.  It isn’t an opinion that is typically had by women.  To me it says that women don’t have as much to complain about as men do, and are blowing their struggles for equality out of proportion.  In my opinion, women have struggled just as much, if not more than men when it comes to identity.  Throughout history white men have had it made for them.  They never had to fight to have the rights they were born with the way that women did.  Thinking about women throughout history not having equal rights, not being able to attend school, not having a say in who they were marrying, or not being able to put their own name on their work contradicts this quote.   If we ever want to be considered truly equal to men, in areas other than just in literature, having women express opinions like this aren’t doing us any good in terms of gaining ground.

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