Sexism In North Country

hese women from the book “ Women Hollering Creek”, were abused and taken advantage of their own men. Sandra Cisneros explores the stories “Never marry a mexican”, Woman Hollering Creek”, and “One holy night”. The women in this stories made a mistake by being with the wrong men in their life. They became careless when they met their own men. These girls have lost their respect for themselves. They have destroyed their own self, for the guy who never really loves them. No one stood up for their rights as a woman. Love and hate made these women vulnerable.

While reading the “Women Hollering Creek” I clearly see how patriarchy dominates the story. Perfectly describing a social system where the male rules and distributes privileges, where men are the head of the family and women are seen as property, subservient and not allowed to exercise any control over their own lives, including marital and sexual control. Cleofila is from Mexico, where she is raised with traditional values in her culture. She grew up in an environment where she was easily influenced by the patriarch in her life, her father, and after she married she continues to be treated as property, when Cleofila is being physically abused by her husband Juan Pedro.

Her only friend is Glory Dodge and her husband Kyle. They aid Josey into getting a job and allow her to stay in their home due to poor relationship with her father. In her job as miner she realizes that women usually undergo sexual harassment, she tries to talk to her boss but he doesn’t take her seriously. Josey is assaulted by Bobby. Through her friend she finds a lawyer in order to help her file a lawsuit against the company.

Women abuse is still a current topic in our society. “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros explores this theme and gives a pattern that is followed by most abused women today. In this reading, Cleofilas’s expectation of a perfect telenovela marriage is ruined by the reality of her abusive husband Juan Pedro. When Cleofila got married, she did not know that she was walking into a trap, a prison filled with pain and bitterness. Cleofila will go out her comfort zone, away from her brothers and father who before she left, promised to never abandon her.

In the vignette entitled “Women Hollering Creek”, Cleófilas is simply given away to her soon to be husband by her father, a choice she takes basically no part in herself, despite it being a life-altering and intimate decision. This type of family dynamic is commonplace in Mexican culture, with the power of the household being ultimately placed upon the head male figure. This is not just a Mexican convention, however, as many women and girls especially experience gender oppression within their own families in their relationships with men, often experiencing “gender domination” (Shaw & Lee, 445). This type of gender oppression can be seen in many different ways within a family with masculine privilege presenting itself by dominating women in subtle or not subtle ways, one such way being “making and/or vetoing important family decisions”, which giving away your daughter to another man certainly is (Shaw & Lee 446). After leaving behind her childhood home and her father, Cleófilas finds herself not only under new “ownership”, but also in a completely different country. She does not speak English, and she has no friends here, or means of leaving. Her power and familiarity has been completely stripped from her, forcing her to rely on this new man entirely for safety. A fact which her husband almost immediately abuses, taking to hurting her physically and secluding her from the world. He has become the new dominant male in her life, able to make all the choices for her, regardless of her feelings or well-being. In this way, the marriage was a transaction of power which bound Cleófilas into subservience (Shaw & Lee (Emma Goldman)

As human beings, one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence, according to philosopher Karl Marx, is the act of work. More specifically, it is the idea that work fulfills human being’s essence. Work, for Marx, is a great source of joy, but only when the worker can see themselves in the work they do, and when said worker wants to partake in the work they are performing. In the capitalist identity, workers are “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital” (Marx and Engel, 1946, pg. 116). Labourers were simply described as “a commodity” (Marx and Engel, 1946, pg. 117) by the ruling class; they are but pieces of a large, intricate gear system, all for the profit of those above them. In this, the worker loses touch with their essence. This concept is referred to, more or less, as alienation. Alienation is a form of separation of how one sees themselves, and how one sees themselves in what they do. Alienation, in many ways, relates to the idea of false consciousness. False consciousness, for Marx, revolves around the idea of misleading society; It is an ideological way of thinking in which no true perception of the world can be achieved. Both alienation and false consciousness delve into the notion of what constitutes true reality. Alienation describes how those that are controlled by the ruling class are subject to a form of disconnect, and false consciousness is a hierarchal idea in

Living in Canada like we do today, we don’t see sexism as a big problem in society. Women get roughly the same rights as men, and are treated the same way for the most part, but in many different countries, this is not the case. Take Saudi Arabia for example. Saudi Arabia is rated 127/136 in the world for countries with best women's rights, meaning they are one of the worst in the world. In Saudi Arabia, many laws are in place that may seem crazy to us, but are a way of living for people living there. Let’s take a look at women’s rights in Saudi Arabia!

Marx’s theory of alienation is the process by which social organized productive powers are experienced as external or alien forces that dominate the humans that create them. He believes that production is man’s act on nature and on himself. Man’s relationship with nature is his relationship with his tools, or means of production. Man’s relationship with himself is fundamentally his relationship to others. Since production is a social concept to Marx, man’s relationship with other men is the relations of production. Marx’s theory of alienation specifically

Among four types of alienation that Marx provides; alienation from the product, alienation from labour process, alienation from one another, and alienation from species-being, the first one explains that what the workers made does not actually belong to them but capitalists (Marx, 1932, p. 325, 326). Furthermore, the process of activities of workers are also estranged from them because workers externalize their ability to work, labour power, to the object, but that labour power is controlled by capitalist and exists outside of workers (Marx, 1932, p. 324). As we saw in the movie, those are workers that who spend 10 hours a day at the workplace and devote themselves producing productions; however, those productions end up belonging to capitalists. For example, trains cars, clothes, and those other commodities are made by hands but it is head that who actually uses them. Consequently, in the capitalist society,

The considerable amount of violence against women in that border town, the answer is due to less protection from the employers and government. It happened only due to the culture of corruption that the movie depicts, where the employers do not want to spend any money on security programs.

This story is based on true events during the strike against the Empire Zinc Mine. It deals with the discrimination of the Mexican-American workers who wanted better working conditions. The film shows some early feminist theory, because the wives goes against the husbands wishes and has a role in the strike. It is one of the best political screenplay ever made because it combines the Old Left labor movement of the 1930s and the Women's Liberation politics in the late '60s. The anti-communist establishment saw this story as a provocation by because of its explicitly political statements and for strongly being in favor of unions. This story links the oppression of not only the workers, but the oppression of the wives making this film not only

Before the industrial revolution, people were defined by their work. For example, a bread maker. They were in charge of the process of making bread, selling the bread and the profit. According to Marx, under capitalism the proletarian experienced “alienation.” This is where an individual is isolated from society, work and sense of self. Marx discussed four different types of alienation: alienation from product, process of labor, from species and of man from man (Murray, Lecture 3). The first being alienation from the product. In Marx’s time and today’s world, we engage in a lot of mass production in our capitalist system. People often are placed in positions where they are responsible for making a small part of the product or engage in a very specific task. Going back to the bread example, under capitalist system, a person may only be in charge of adding the flour to the machine and the rest of the work is done by the machine. The person is not involved in any other aspect of the work. Today many people work to make a produced that they do not own for other people to consume with the purpose of being to sell of that product and make the maximum amount of profit. But in today’s world, the profit is owned by the capitalist owner who is in charge of the production, and distribution of the product. The second type of alienation is the alienation from one’s own labor. Making products in the capitalist system puts people in a repetitive position. The laborers end up going through the motions they have one highly specialized job in production the whole product. The labor does not give input into the purpose design distribution or marketing of the product. Simply, the worker is a small piece of the puzzle. The third is the alienation from others. To Marx, this human essence was not separate from activity or work, but being separate from other human species. The fourth is alienation from man to man where the worker can’t connect to other worker. Workers compete with each other. A capitalist system sees the labor of the worker to a commercial commodity that can be traded in the competitive labor-market. It does not view labor as a constructive socioeconomic activity that is part of the collective common effort performed

Alienation, in Marxist terms, refers to the separation of the mass of wage workers from the products of their own labor. Marx first expressed the idea, somewhat poetically, in his 1844 Manuscripts: "The object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer."

The theory of alienation developed by Karl Marx depicts the estrangement of people due to living in a capitalist system of production. Through the manuscript “Estranged Labor” from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes his theory of alienation and specifies on the four types of ways in which the worker is alienated. A vivid example of Marx’s theory of alienation can be seen through Charlie Chaplin’s comedy film Modern Times. In his film, the central idea of the theory of labor alienation and how the worker is affected by the alienation are depicted. The notion of alienation depicted in Marx’s “Estranged Labor” is also depicted in Chaplin’s Modern Times.

One day at the mine, Josey was attacked by one of the male employees and she then called its quits with mining. For this reason, Josey decided to take legal action, by suing the mining company for discrimination and sexual harassment. At first, Josey was alone when trying to win the case against the company. Many of the other women preferred not to testify because they were afraid they would lose their source of income or get treated even worst once they returned to the mine. Josey was very brave for standing up for what was right, she then inspired the other women to speak up by telling her story. Eventually Josey was able to win her case against the Pearson mining company with the help of the other women testimonies.