Women’s Empowerment through the Everyday
1. Ivory Miniatures
What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow? — How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour? —Jane Austen
Often, many critics of Austen’s words, originally written to her nephew, Edward, improperly cite her words as a way to portray a deprecation of “female” writing as suitable or accommodating to the expectations of the female gender (Leffel). Her stories of young women, of love, of courtship, and femininity—these seem to represent her succumbing to the expectations put on women in literature. However, a good look at her writing reveals “a dazzling array of experiments with literary form and genre… [that are] filled with rebellious, transgressive heroines who steal, murder, elope, binge, and booze” and notably radical content that extends far beyond the demarcated field of literature in which women in her era were expected to remain (Leffel). Austen “playfully skewers generic conventions and forces the reader to re-think customary constructions of the novel” and miniaturizes the “picturesque” genre through an empowerment of the typical, expected, everyday topics. She uses heroines “who boldly and unapologetically flaunts gender boundaries, social codes, and even laws…[challenging] her era’s stifling restrictions on women’s bodies and minds at the same time that she questions exactly what constitutes a ‘novel’” (Leffel). She takes the “everyday” woman, her everyday settings and the typical representation of such, in order to comment upon “gendered conventions and social and political implications that this genre in particular—and the novel more generally—normatively assumes” (Leffel). Through her writing and use of satire of the expected tropes in women’s writing, Austen empowers the everyday notions of “femininity” and transforms them into platforms of growth and strength.
2. The Ethics of Seeing
Susan Meiselas, a Magnum photographer, empowers in a medium different from Austen’s—through photography. As a lover of anthropology, Meiselas shares an intrigue of the human condition, constantly searching for meaning within the people she captures. She often speaks about the “ethics of seeing,” which “involves connecting, engaging, and feeling compassion for your subjects” as a way into truly brining value to a photo (“The Ethics of Seeing”). By connecting with the photo’s story and context, viewers are pushed to extend themselves out into the world and explore overarching themes. The particular photograph that I connected with and used to push myself into the direction of my project was taken in Monimbo, Nicaragua, in 1979, while she was documenting the country’s treacherous revolution. In this photo, a woman, in an eye-catching red dress, pushes a dead body, wrapped up and tied down to a wooden cart. More time and research with this photo led me to the following facts: the woman is 14 years old, and the dead body is her husband. Meiselas represents her powerfully, in a bold dress, holding up the dead body. To me, this photo portrayed the great hand women have had and continue to have in holding up history. Through this photo, I went beyond the story behind the woman and the dead body and grasped onto the potential symbolic implications of this depiction: the concept of strong women. With this idea in mind, I look into some more of Meiselas’ other work, particularly her work on carnival strippers.
3. Candid Representation
In Carnival Strippers (1972-1975), her first major work, Meiselas, without eroticizing or sexualizing, captures the raw reality of the lives of “women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina” (Meiselas). Overcoming the stigma and potential preconceived biases that could easily have been attached to her work on women who hold jobs that are not respected in society, she candidly—and truthfully—observed their situation. Using both photographs and interviews, Meiselas captured these women on stage and backstage, and “what is revealed is that, behind the curtain, the dancers are essentially workers. Taking a few minutes off, they are resting, cleaning up, smoking” (English). She shows the uncompromising truth of their lives which are not always about being sex icons. She documents their everyday, and in this, like Austen, Meiselas empowers their efforts to make a living the best they could within a “seedy” world. She emphasizes the voices of these women and challenges the societal conventional confines that aim to demean and weaken the strength of women in such jobs.
4. My Project
Through these three lenses, combining the idea of empowerment through the rawness of the everyday and the concept of “holding up” history, I found myself focusing on a subject that was real—and close—to me: women in college. Through photosets of my friend, Sam, in different settings, holding different things, I strived to paint a few different ways in which women in college can be empowered in the everyday, the “ordinary,” through the ivory miniatures of their daily lives. Like Meiselas, I wanted to take advantage of the illustrative, narrative quality that photographs embrace. In order to paint a tangible depiction of female empowerment through the everyday, I decided to use platform of the photo collage. Through the combining of photos that capture the whole body, the hand, the act of holding up and object, I created a fuller representation of the empowerment of women through everyday concepts.
I wanted to explore the empowerment of women without having to romanticize them, to portray strong women in ordinary life, rather than as superheroes or goddesses. Thus, I created three photosets, titled Sword, Shield, and Armor; each one signifying one way in which the everyday, the ordinary, the usual, gives power to women in college.
A play on the phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” Sword portrays how expression, the concept of writing, acts as a tool for women in college to not only express themselves but speak up. Particularly in an era of technology and internet, sharing your writing has become incredibly simple. Through blogs, diaries, journals—entities often associated with the female experience and popular among women in college—we are encouraged to and hold the authority to share the female voice which is much less prevalent in mainstream news, media, and literature. By “holding up” our pens, women garner the propensity to be heard, to create, to use writing as a tool for social change and equality; we strike against the trends in our world—in literature, journalism, and influential schools of thought that are charged with the masculine experience. Through the power of the written word, she speaks up for her strength, her belief, her capabilities.
Armor focuses on what women choose to wear and fights the stigma around the phrase, “dressed to be seen.” Taken at Washington Square Park, full of people who come to see and to be seen, I spurn the idea that women are objects of entertainment and dress for others. Beyond deconstructing the stigma around how women dress, how they should dress, and how their clothes label them, I want to reject the stigma around the idea of presentation, of showing off. Through their clothes—accessories, makeup—women not only express themselves but are empowered to use her the clothes she holds up with her body as a demonstration of the beauty of herself, her style, her woman-ness. Instead of being shackled by labels, women dress in their “armor” against the demarcation of the identity of a woman based on her clothes. The way she chooses to present herself empowers her in her self-expression, her presentation of herself to the world, allowing her to not be shaken by attacks against her identity. She is strong in who she is and she shows this through the clothes she chooses to wear each day.
The last photoset, Shield, represents how college women empower themselves through knowledge and education. With intelligence and wisdom, women can stay informed and well-educated on the workings of the world in order to fight against ignorance, injustice, and inequality. Through education, women are empowered to not only take on influential, powerful positions in the workforce, the government, the society, but also protect—to shield—themselves from further discrimination and patronization. Education equates to independence. Through the act of learning, women garner skillsets to help them thrive and support themselves in the world, instead of falling into the molds society expects us to fall into. Through her education, she harnesses the power to expand in a world that wants her to stay still.
Overall, through my project, I depict women empowerment, as a movement that has nothing to do with hierarchy, putting women over men. The primary objective of feminism— is about urging women to believe in their capabilities and identities as living beings who are capable of immense strength and creativity. As Mary Wollstonecraft states, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
Works Cited (and Consulted)
Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters, a Family Record. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Print.
English, Deirdre. Stripped Bare: Nude Girls and Naked Truth.” Carnival Strippers. By Susan Meiselas. Steidl: Steidl, Gerhard Druckerei und Verlag, 2003. 153-9. Print.
The Ethics of Seeing. Perf. Susan Meiselas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, n.d. Web.
Harrison, Jim. “A Lens on History.” Harvard Magazine. Harvard Magazine Inc, 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 06 May 2016.
Leffel, John C. “Jane Austen’s Miniature ‘Novel’: Gender, Politics and Form in The Beautiful Cassandra.” Persuasions 32 (2010): 184-95.
Meiselas, Susan. “Susan Meiselas Photographer.” Carnival Strippers. Magnum Photos, 1972-1975. Web. 06 May 2016.
“Portrait Miniature.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.
Seymour, Tom. “Susan Meiselas: Carnival Strippers.” British Journal of Photography. Aptitude Media Ltd., 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 06 May 2016.
Todd, Janet. “Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen.” British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History. Ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan. New York: Palgrave, 2005. 76-97.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, the Wollstonecraft Debate, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1988. Print.
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