Shreya's English Blog

In the piece “Our Barbies, Ourselves”, Prager criticizes society’s expectations for women and how these were channeled into Barbie. Prager solidifies her disapproval of men’s expectations for women through language. Prager somewhat offers a concession to the claims she makes throughout her essay. She admits that she “loved Barbie” and still somewhat identifies with Barbie’s signature designs. Prager shows how iconic the toy was when she admits to having enjoyed the toy despite the fact that Barbie looked like someone “who got her start at the Playboy mansion”. Throughout the piece, she emphasizes the prominence of the toy in society despite its flaws and biases toward women. However her reasoning for never getting married seems to conflict with her reasoning and claim she argues for in the essay. She criticizes the creators of Barbie for creating her physical appearance in a way that she felt was biased. However, she also “follows” the creators when she decided not to marry because s...

Nearly 100 years after women were given the right to vote, it is still evident that women and men are not viewed as equal. When women were granted the right to vote, it was thought that women would begin to become equal to men. Although society has made considerable progress, there is still a wide disparity between women and men in many aspects of their everyday lives. As seen in Brady's "I Want a Wife", it is clear that some of the outrageous expectations placed on women by men have dissolved. Some of these include "if, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one" and "my wife will take the children and be solely responsible for them so I am left free". The piece also emphasizes how women are expected to take care of the children, maintain the house, keep a job, go to school all while being dominated by their husbands. As shown by Brady's es...

In both pieces that we read this week, both seemed to have one underlying message. Both pieces discussed society's tendency to "mark" people just because they are different. In "Disability" by Nancy Mairs, she discusses society's tendency to treat and view people with disabilities differently. Mairs even calls herself a "cripple" to exemplify society's tendency to mark her. In the piece, "There is no Unmarked Woman", Tannen explores the judgments women face. She goes on to describe how men can often times get away with being under-dressed or excused for their actions, while women are often times marked and immediately labeled if they were trying to pull the same things. To further prove her point, Tannen includes an anecdote of when a TV host asked a man in the audience if she thought Tannen's book was male-bashing. He answered yes but agreed that everything she was saying about men and women were true. This incident displays ho...