A Feminist Approach

Essay by jericaUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, February 2003

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For sure, in a present existence that seems to me as diminutive as prehistory, I too thought I would get married. I speak of my seventh, my twelve years of age. However, it is strange: the more I organize and search through my memory of that person I was, the less I find the word "marriage." As an only child, I found myself observing wives, husbands, fiancées, the betrothed. That even then gave me a mysterious annoyance. What I really wanted as a girl, I suppose, was a partner to love and by whom to be loved forever; as in the fairy tales I was so fond of. Yet I felt an unconscious threat in the fairy tale, which I am more aware of now, a mortal risk: what if such a lover kidnapped me for life? Human beings are affiliative, social animals (Owen, 85); I have never been a domestic animal.

I do not imagine myself happy locked up in the small cosmos of a monogamy household. Furthermore, the profession of wife and her domestic and subsistence tasks required for a household is existence has always filled me with horror. I want to write, to travel, to know the world, to use the miracle and right of having been born. "To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of his success, his dreams. Giving up my name to someone else weakens my identity. To annul myself in a way such as that, why? I am mine, I have a soul, and nothing can own someone or something with a soul. Though somewhat confused, unaware, at times a human being with a feminist approach, I can be a woman in a society invented and determined by men, instead I never give this...