Scribe: 3.31.2009
Posted on March 31st, 2009 by Mr. Eldridge
Period 5
Fifth period today started off with a ten-point quiz on “Are Women Human?” by Dorothy L. Sayers and “The Mindless Menace of Violence” by Robert Kennedy; a lot of us freaked out because we only had a few minutes to do it. After the quiz, we went over all the questions, and moved on to the main points of Sayer’s speech and how she formulated her argument. Here are the main points:
- The author argued that women are not just equal to men, but they are human.
- The name of her speech sets up her argument; this way, she is not answering the question “are women as good as men?”, but “are women human?”.
- She believes that women, as well as men, should be treated as individuals, and not as a group. Grouping leads to generalization and stereotypes.
- In her speech, Sayers first brings up arguments from the side opposite hers, and then disproves them. For example, she disproves the argument “women copy men” by explaining that women have already done men’s jobs long ago, just in a different way and environment.
- In addition, Sayer stresses that women do not engage in “masculine” jobs or activities just to say that they did it, but because they are individual people, and they want to benefit themselves from what they do.
- The author defines feminism many times in her speech, so that the audience knows she does not think women are superior to men (many people believe that is true of feminists).
Mr. Eldridge asked the class which of us would consider ourselves feminists, and nobody raised their hand. We then looked up the definition of feminist, which according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, is: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”. He asked us again who was a feminist, and then the whole class raised their hands. Mr. E concluded that at first we didn’t raise our hands because we didn’t know the true definition of a feminist; we supposed they were radical and believed themselves to be superior to men. However, that is not the case. The supposed definition of the word has changed over time, and that is why we didn’t know what a feminist really was.
Our homework is to read “Federalist No. 10″ and do the study guide.
-Sarah 
Period 4
Hey period 4!
So today we started off the period with a wonderful little quiz from last night’s reading of “Are Women Human” and “Mindless Menace of Violence”. It was open note, but we did not have a lot of time so if you didn’t read it you still could not do as well. After this we graded it and then we discussed the two readings.
*In “Are Women Human”, the argument is not are woman equal to men, but are women human?
*She sets up the argument so the reader must agree with her
*At this point, Mr. E asked a question and TLP tried to answer it but forgot what she was saying so while she was remembering it, Tristan finally turned around and started paying attention. By then, TLP remembered and answered the question
*Jordan said that the audience was “crazy feminists” and nobody else agreed with him but then he said it was in the analysis section and nobody could argue with that
*The overall argument is that women are human and humans are different from each other, but equal
*Reading Aristotle depends on the individual person
-a person who says a woman cannot read it generalizes and the author of “Are Women Human” tries to get away from generalizations
*Women and men (humans) can all be feminists
*The best question of the day, by Eric Henson, is “what is feminism?”
-According to the dictionary, it is the theory of economic or political non equality of genders
-When most people think of feminists, they think of loud women who refuse to let a man open the door for them or pay
And that concludes 4th period!
~Annie Goldenberg
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