Suffer Not A Woman To Speak [R]

Call me crazy, but I felt just a little bit stereotypical deciding to read and ruminate on Suffer Not a Woman to Speak. Being a girl, wouldn’t it make sense for me to wish to read on women’s place in early continental history? After all, I should relate to women’s history the most, out of all the topics we discuss in class. The loyalty we feel for our respective genders seems to color the way we see things, and subtly influences our education as a result. I was sort of expecting to feel some kind of surge in my feminist feelings after reading the article—but this didn’t happen. I now realize why.

Women are glorified in their actions simply because society has repressed them for so long. Adam ruling Eve, the Common Law keeping women from their own sense of individuality, Blackstone’s Commentaries setting back equity laws and their progress… all this tells the story of women who were forced to fight for their standing in history. These women rose up and did whatever they could, with whatever society allowed them to do. Just because men had more power in the community did not mean that women were any less important. Of course, the author writes about this, while at the same time making clear that life was not as difficult for women in the colonial period as history makes it seem. (I’m just making it clear that I am not trying to diminish the struggles females went through in any way). It’s just that this is the first time I’ve ever read an article appealing to the more conservative side of feminism—that while women dealt with a ton of hardship and oppression, they also had plenty of opportunities to use what they had to make changes and create waves in their communities. Of course, radical women’s movements may have been the movements necessary to do huge things, like gaining suffrage, but there is a much simpler view on feminism existing in which women “resist the system” by slowly pushing onward and proving themselves in society. I believe the author of Suffer Not a Woman to Speak speaks of such a viewpoint, and as a result proves that feminism in itself is a result of pride in the past, and a new vision for the future based on that past. The women of the colonial period are the first steps to creating a completely unbiased society, in which the Constitutional statement “we the people” will actually mean, “we the people”.

Works Cited:

Murrin, John, Paul E. Johnson, James M. McPherson, Gary Gerstle, Emily S. Rosenberg, and

Normal L. Rosenburg. Liberty Equality Power A History of the American People. Third

Edition. Toronto