Reflection and Connection

Before this course, I always felt the society I lived in, I always felt it in everything I tried to do, everywhere I went, whenever I watched television, and whenever I spoke to people. I always felt this fixed, rigid, and broken thing, but I could never put a name to it. Now that I've taken this course I can; its called patriarchy. The name to a face. Its much easier to understand the world I live in by understanding that single word alone, and I am different for it. The reading that particularly changed my view on the world was Allan G. Johnson's Patriarchy, the System, and the way he explained that "we are not patriarchy, no more than people who believe in Allah are Islam or Canadians are Canada." We exist in this system like the players Johnson mentioned in Monopoly. We can change the rules if we go against the path of least resistance, and we can end the cycle of socialization. This was the greatest thing that I learned.

Ive also benefited from learning about marginalization. I am a Puerto Rican girl who has grown up around whites my whole life and doesn't know a lick of Spanish. I don't quite fit in completely with white people because I am Spanish, and I don't fit in with Spanish people because I act "white." Finally, a name for what people like me go through.

The way I feel about women's health, reproductive rights, and violence toward women also changed me. It made me mad. I was having a conversation with my boyfriend one night about what us women are forced to endure-rape, physical, emotional, verbal abuse- and I was enraged! Hearing how passionate I was, I suppose he felt that he was personally being attacked, so he said, "Why are you so mad, it's not like YOU'VE ever been raped." I was mortified that he could say something so ignorant. Needless to say, we are no longer together.  This class and all of the women author's voices in my head, is no longer something I can ignore. I'm not ignorant of it anymore, so I have no more excuses for why I let injustices occur right before my eyes.

I admire the multicultural feminist approach to problem solving, and the way it takes into account the intersectionality between not only gender differences, but class, race, and dis/ableist differences as well. I plan to take into account all of these things, when I go to formulate decisions and theories in the future.

This course has shown me that women's issues are real. They continue to be real, even though we have the right to vote. I have experienced the flaws of societal institutions through my service learning when I reached roadblocks trying to set up storefront tabling, and when men continued to ask me out instead of listen to the information I was trying to tell them. These causes are just not important to people, and it is almost like only an enlightened few are even aware that these issues exist.

I am seeing the world more clearly now and the system and institutions from which we all operate within. I can better recognize what is going on around me-the story behind the story. I feel stronger and smarter now that I know the scores of women from history's past to the present who are rooting for me, and know that I can do it.