Fern sends a message out to all women who suffer from demanding husbands by suggesting the occupying of only the womanly territories of the household (she mentions the “place” of the housekeeper), and the maintaining of temper. Is the accepting and reinforcing of a negative stereotypical role a good reaction to oppressive men?
In her work “A Law More Nice Than Just,” Fern highlights the idea that men won’t allow women to wear men’s clothing, even though it is exponentially difficult walking in the rain wearing an acceptable woman’s dress. There is real logic behind the law: what could the rain be a metaphor for?
-Matt Myers
What interesting questions!
ReplyDeleteIs it good? Not sure-- passive aggressive, certainly. In considering the social advantages of marriage for women of the time, and even more so the disadvantages of being unmarried, the tactic seems effective in calling attention to a discrepancy between the domestic woman as a professional and a domestic woman as a person, therefore provoking a conversation indirectly with the husband and perhaps saving the woman in the relationship from endangering herself physically and economically in pursuing interpersonal justice-- i.e. getting her partner to recognize and respect her agency without hitting her or throwing her out.
As for the second, I'm not sure I understand it. If the rain is a metaphor it seems to be one of "reality" outside of prevalent value judgments. The rain in and of itself has no social value-- it's just a variable feature of the environment-- but when it interacts with clothing, it somehow becomes a potential barrier of social construction. (What if someone sees me in wet clothes? What if I get cold and dirty?) Men's clothes, it seems, are constructed to be first useful in public spaces and women's clothes are designed first to meet social expectation in public spaces -- not that there isn't overlap-- not all pants are equal or completely without aesthetic importance, but I don't think, at least in the context Fanny gives us, that ANY skirt is more practical than any other when it comes to the things many people really want and need.