Journaling: An Act Against The Patriarchy

When we reflect on first-wave feminism, we can observe women stepping into enlightenment and discovering new ways of life for themselves. We can also observe how patriarchal views, perspectives, and lifestyles were still deeply embedded in and influencing society. Although women were understanding and being introduced to autonomy and independence, they still had to work around existing in an oppressive patriarchal society with these newfound ideologies. 

One of the main reasons why there is inequality between the sexes is that women have always been positioned lower on the social hierarchy. We can see this theme play out in almost every system, whether familial, social, or professional. Of course, the severity of it varies depending on the intersectionalities of each woman, but cis-heteronormative women’s roles tend to remain in a box. Women were expected to be caretakers, cooks, clean, sit still, and look pretty. They weren’t meant to educate themselves, to think on their own, to be strong, to live without a man leading them. So, if this is the groundwork of the world that we live in, we can imagine how challenging it must have been for women to fight against a system that deemed them less valuable in the first place. 

We can use the journal I inspected at the Gerth archives as evidence of how oppressive the life of a real housewife was in the 1800s and how deprived she was of any individuality or privacy. Journals are typically used for jotting down one's thoughts and are meant to be viewed only by the person writing in them. When observing the journal, I noticed that her entries, from start to finish, were about her day-to-day life, yet most of the time she wrote about her husband. The tone was always mundane and repetitive. In her writing, she often worried about her husband at work while she was at home with the children. She mentions in her first few entries that she had to take care of herself while she was sick because, at the time, caretaking was a woman’s duty. She also had to take care of her husband when he wound up sick, although he was never expected to support her in the same way. She had very few social outings that didn’t involve the church, and she only wrote about those briefly. 

Observing this, we can see that even in an attempt to create her autonomy by simply writing about her life, she’s still being oppressed or influenced by the patriarchy. She is still thinking about her husband instead of allowing herself to go deeper, to feel, or reflect because women weren’t encouraged to think about themselves or for themselves. If we take a closer look, we can see a woman who is longing for some kind of individualism through writing. We can see her attempt at challenging the patriarchy by encouraging herself to be intellectual, but we also see that her inability to think outside of her current reality is due to societal programming. Society doesn’t encourage women to be intellectuals or thinkers. This woman didn’t allow herself to acknowledge her feelings about her life because the patriarchy didn’t care either. She was made to believe that it is selfish to center her perspective and to have opinions or questions about anything. Although she did it, and maybe unintentionally, it was an act of courage for her to seek out privacy for herself during an era when women were deeply oppressed intellectually. We can visibly see how her actions correlate to the start of first-wave feminism; women taking the first step to understand and figure out womanhood without the misogynistic lens. She didn’t quite have the tools or perspectives to encourage her to broaden her point of view. However, journaling was a great way to start.