Last Thoughts I Wanted to Share

For my last post, I'd like to get some thoughts about my paper on here. I'm talking about the female embodiment in texts by Fanny Fern and Lucille Clifton. Both of these women were awesome. They used writing to deal with life situations in their own ways.

Fern manipulated societal rules in order to accommodate her own comfort and health and to help fight social injustice. She was a cross-dresser. She wore men's clothes not only for her own comfort, but also to challenge the laws stating that women could not wear pants. Her article "A Law More Nice than Just" chronicles a time when she stepped out in her husband's clothes rather than sitting at home or catching "a consumption dragging round wet petticoats" (Fern 2106). She went against social norms to protect and comfort her own body. 


Clifton's poems reveal a powerful exploration of the female body. Her poems were progressive even for readers in the late twentieth century. The poems “to my last period” and “poem to my uterus” establish the female body as the core of the female identity while managing a distinction between that core and the woman as a whole. She wrote these in response to her upcoming hysterectomy which was being performed to induce menopause. She was coming to terms with her impending loss of "womanhood." 
 

These women used personal situations in their writing to comfort themselves and other women experiencing similar situations and discomforts. Without their contributions to literature, people might not feel the same way toward female embodiment. These women are my heroes.