Women's Bodies

After reading the first few paragraphs of Weitz's article, where she mentions Aristotle and the Greek doctor Galen, it becomes quite clear that men have always searched for an explanation and justification for why women are so inferior. Aristotle and Galen claimed that women's bodies lacked the heat that men had externally, "explaining" why women's brains were smaller, they had emotional weaknesses, they were sexually deviant, etc. There are also themes of female inferiority in the Christian Bible, which another professor of mine described that men in power misinterpreted the Adam and Eve story to be one of female deviancy when it was actually about disobedience to God. Over the years, men have also come up with several more reasons why women will never measure up to their male counterparts. The majority of the reasons seem to lie within female reproductive systems. Women in the 1800s who wished to attend college were told that their ovaries and uterus' would shrink if they wasted energy on non womanly things. Therefore, educated women had deviated away from their God given role and the role that society had given them: motherhood and child rearing. I feel that these men who came up with these outrageous excuses were truly paranoid about the possibility of women having minds of their own, how else could they have thought of such ridiculous things about women?

Another thing that I brought up in my discussion questions was that whenever women do have an ailment, the only thing the doctors are concerned about are that your reproductive capabilities are still intact. This, which is still happening to many women, including myself, shows that women's worth and value lies within her "ability" to create healthy children. The fact that this is still how women are treated at the doctors office is disheartening.

One more point that I would like to bring up is women's own control over their fertility. The fact that there is a current debate about the legality of birth control, judged by an all male panel says a lot about how women are still not granted equality to men. I wonder if anyone has ever stopped to question why only female forms of contraception are ever up for debate. Abortion and the pill is always a heated debate, so much that some find these methods to be unethical and wish they would be outlawed. I wonder what people would say if the government decided to limit or stop the sale of male contraceptives. A contraceptive is a contraceptive. It all does the same (well almost, stops pregnancy) thing in the end anyway. It should be up to an individual to decide if they want to control their fertility, it is after all, their body, and they should have the final say in what happens to it. To make particular forms of women's contraception illegal is to impose sex discrimination on women, including abortion in my opinion. People will argue that it is murder, but when it comes right down to it, it is still the woman's body and she should be the only one to have control over it, not the government.

Erin Pattridge