A League of Their Own Essay Example for Free

A League of Their Own Essay In A League of Their Own, a girls baseball league was started while the professional male baseball players, along with many other men, were across seas fighting in World War II. This movie takes place in 1943. A group of ladies left their homes to become part of the All-American Girls Baseball League to keep the baseball traditions alive. In this movie, gender roles are crossed. After years of perpetrating the image of the docile little women who sat at home caring for her lord and master, American society suddenly found that it needed women who were competent to do hard skilled work during World War II (Ebert). This was alarming to the nation and threatening to some. During one of the scenes, a radio announcer announces that the league was dangerous to society. She called it sexual confusion. Much of the country began to worry about what type of women the men would have to come back to. Society believes that women should be sensitive and nurturing, not competitive. At this time, women were also running the businesses and factories. Working in factories and playing competitive sports were considered to be the role of the males. Women are to be sensitive, nurturing, and open (Johnsen). By playing sports and working in factories, women began to take over some more masculine traits. This was threatening to the men. They saw this as loosing control. Women play many parts in mens struggle for control. One part that women play is to support the idea that men and women are fundamentally different because this gives men a clear and unambiguous turf masculinity on which to pursue control in competition with one another (Johnsen). This threatened mens role and their sense of control. This threatened their masculinity. Even though women were now taking over the factories and sports while the men were away, there still were many politics involved. Instead of this new baseball league being looked at as a competitive sport, it was more of a show. One of the scouts in this movie did not want to take one of the most outstanding baseball players because she wasnt pretty. The scout finds her too homely for the league (Brown). Also, they were forced to wear skirt outfits to play in the dirt. When the women complained about that, the male instructor commented that they should be glad he isnt going to make them all wear bathing suits to play in. As if the uniforms werent discrimination enough, each and every girl had to take classes at a charm and beauty school. Here, they taught these women how to be ladies. They critiqued them in every way. They walked around and inspected each one, ordering for haircuts, eyebrow waxings, etc. When they reached the homely Marla, they were stumped as to what to do. They didnt see anyone being able to make a lady out of her. One instructor asked the other what she suggested. All the women could reply back was a lot of night games. She said this about one of the best players in the league. Also at the school, the ladies were taught how to sip not slurp tea, cross their legs appropriately, walk with grace, and balance a book on their head to promote a more graceful, feminine posture. As the movie continues, this so called womens league wasnt drawing in any profits and was threatened with closing down. This devastated the girls in the league. This league gave them something to speak of, something of their own, a sense of pride rather than just cooking and cleaning. In order to keep the league continuing, the girls had to draw attention and draw a crowd. It started to turn into a circus. The girls had to do splits to make plays more interesting, slid while the guys on the sidelines got a glimpse up their skirts, anything to make it more interesting and less threatening. At first the women were not given the respect they deserved for their hard work. Nobody believed that these housewives could play hard ball. Once the girls proved themselves, the men and the rest of society got threatened and still didnt watch. Until the sport became a show, it wasnt approved of. The girls had contests with the game to make it more interesting. One contest was called Catch a foul, win a kiss. This helps to illustrate that women are objects to be competed for, possessed, and used (Johnsen). Once the women began to make a show of the sport, the bleachers filled. Headlines began to read things such as Trading oven mitts for baseball mitts! and Diamonds, a Womens Best Friend. Women didnt receive their own league until it was the way the men wanted it. They werent to play competitively. It was to be more of a show. Women have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received (Beauvoir). This is because men fear competition from women. If they are playing baseball and working in the factories, then what is the male role? Every woman who goes into medicine or law robs them of a job (Beauvoir). The men were threatened to what else the women would begin to do. Hollywood threw out its romance scripts and started making movies about strong, independent females and it was discovered that women could actually excel at professional sports (Ebert). This is a phenomenal movie that shows the power of women. It gets women out of the house and into the work force. It gets them doing just as the men. This was just the start of the women getting out of the house. Once the men came back from war, the women fought to keep their league alive. Many of the women in and outside of the league went on to be doctors and lawyers. Women were breaking out of the house whether the men were ready for it or not. The first girls in the league now have the own spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I believe that these women truly deserve this. Works Cited http://www.rottentomatoes.com.review.sn:usr/ns-home/cgi-bin/ad/adq.cgi, Joe Brown, 1992 http://wwwsuntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1992/07/764762html, Ebert, 1992 Johnson, Allan G. 1997. The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953. The Second Sex. Trans. And ed. H.M. Parshley. New Yourk: Alfred A. Knopf. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feninine Mystique. New York: Dell. (20th ann. Ed. Published by W.W. Norton, 1983.) A League of Their Own, 1992.

A Comparison of the Culture of Things Fall Apart and Western Culture :: comparison compare contrast essays

The Culture of Things Fall Apart vs. Western Culture Many societies have beliefs rooted deep in ancient religion. Some beliefs include polygamy, polytheism, and patriarchy, or rule by men. One such culture is that of Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Polytheism and polygamy are custom in the clan, and the role of each family member is very defined. The men are overly domineering. The women and children are treated poorly and often beaten. Life in Achebe's Umuofia would seem very different to someone living in modern day America. Chinua Achebe's 1959 novel, Things fall Apart, takes place in the 1890s, just before British colonization. The novel focuses on the nine Ibo-speaking villages of Umuofia, which is Ibo for "People of the Forest." Umuofia is the village in which Okonkwo, Achebe's protagonist, prospers in everything and is able to secure his manly position in the tribe. Now known as Nigeria, this land was a primitive agricultural society completely run by men. Umuofia was known, and as Achebe says, ."..feared by all it's neighbors. It was powerful in war and in magic, and priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country" (11). Perhaps, its most powerful and feared magic was called .".. agadi- nwayi, or old woman it had its shrine in the centre of Umuofia ... if anyone was so foolhardy as to pass by the shrine past dusk he was sure to see the old woman"(12). The people of Umuofia are very devoted to their religion and their magic. These ancient beliefs were believed to give the people some sort of power over their oppressors. One custom of Umuofia that would be very different from Western culture is Polygamy, the practice of having many wives. This custom is practiced in the connected nine villages of Umuofia. In fact, a man's wealth is partially measured by the number of wives he has. A wealthy man described in Things Fall Apart, had nine wives and thirty children. Okonkwo had three wives and eight children. Polygamy is not something many Americans are accustomed to. Western culture teaches that monogamy, as opposed to polygamy, is the proper, accepted form of marriage. Western culture places that morality into it's people, often from youth.

Difference Multiculturalism: Diversified, Not Unified

Multiculturalism connotes diversity in culture and society. In realization of the diversity in American culture, multiculturalism has its roots in the things that separate people from each other. Varieties of multiculturalism go in different directions; but whether radical or liberal, whether emphasizing power or weakness and the distinct contributions of each ethnic group, multiculturalism keeps coming back to its roots in the word â€Å"difference†. The ideal of diversity, the mixing of things up, spreading the wealth, creating a new concept of â€Å"us†, never quite ensued rapidly. In relating to racial, ethnic and sexual identity, multiculturalism carved out discrete areas of high visibility but kept those areas self-contained. Since the middle of the 1990's, dissatisfaction with this situation has been widespread, especially as the very concept of race has been forcefully called into question. Black may have been beautiful in the 1960's, and powerful in the 1970's, but it has also become increasingly viewed by cultural historians as a social construct, one fixed in place only by racism itself (Cotter, 2001). In fostering positive relationships across the â€Å"difference multiculturalism† reveal a classic problem of traditional American individualism. This means people come without a strong bond to the community the individual can pursue his or her own ideas and values without check by the views of other people. A multiculturalism rooted in difference exaggerates the individualist’s tendency to let one’s personal feeling become the norm for judging the rest of the world. Most people assume the correctness of their own views, and they find confirmation in their own experience. This is a universal human tendency, but one that needs to be somewhat reigned in for a society to survive. As it magnifies ethnocentricity, Charles Taylor criticized â€Å"difference multiculturalism† as he proposed a resolution of the conflict between the politics of universal dignity and the ethnocentric type of multiculturalist politics of difference. Parens (1994) believed that it is less a compromise than an attempt to compel ethnocentrists to achieve universal dignity. Rather than bestowing all cultures equal respect, â€Å"difference multiculturalism† risks essentializing the idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group or race; it risks reifying cultures as separate entities by overemphasizing the internal homogeneity of cultures in terms that potentially legitimize repressive demands for communal conformity As Henry Louis Gates has written, â€Å"mixing and hybridity are the rule, not the exception.† This way of understanding â€Å"difference multiculturalism† obscures the concept of hybridization by magnifying on differences, which clearly raises the same problems associated with the melting pot. Multiculturalism†¦is a theory (albeit vague) about the foundations of a culture rather than a practice which subsumes cultural ideas (Harrison, 1984). As a widely-scoped concept, the term is often used to describe societies (especially nations) which have many distinct cultural groups, usually as a result of immigration. This can lead to anxiety about the stability of national identity, yet can also lead to cultural exchanges that benefit the cultural groups. By including all differences, one cannot help but exclude those who do not respect the difference of others. Apart from its original concept, even multiculturalism must exclude. By acquiring the universal culture of willing universal laws, all human beings were to become included in the human family. Thus, cultural practices that emanate from some source other than our own; it has perhaps made us forgetful of the ineradicable character of exclusion and attachment to â€Å"one's own† in politics. In his analysis, Terence Turner (1993) cites the explicit use of culture in politics, he advocates â€Å"critical multiculturalism† instead as a means to avoid essentialist notions of culture embedded within â€Å"difference multiculturalism†. In this, Turner approvingly quotes Stam and Shohat (n.d.): critical multiculturalism, they say, â€Å"rejects a unified, essentialist concept of identity . . . Rather, it sees the self as polycentric, multiple, unstable, historically situated, the product of ongoing differentiation and polymorphous identifications† (Turner 1993, p. 418). Thus, as â€Å"difference muliticulturalism† magnifies differences through identity politics, â€Å"critical multiculturalism† seems to be a better alternative as it pluralizes groups and cuts across them, thereby encouraging diverse voices to participate in democratic debate. Works Cited Cotter, H. Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?   New York Times.  (Late Edition, East Coast). New York, N.Y., 29 July 2001, p.  2.1 Parens, J. Multiculturalism and the Probglem of Particularism, The American Political Science Review, vol.88, no.1, 1994. Taylor, Charles. Comparison, History, Truth In F.E. Reynolds and D. Trang. (eds.) Myth and Philosophy. Albany: NY, 1990. Turner, T. Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What is anthropology that multiculturalists should be mindful of it? Cultural Anthropology, 1993, Vol.8, No.4   

The Controversy Of Race And Authority - 1071 Words

Has one ever felt disheartened watching the news and the headlines says that there was another minority victim in an officer related shooting? Has one ever wondered why race versus authority is such a huge problem? Has one ever asked how did society get this far as to physically harming law enforcement? The answer is the media has allowed it to get this far. Race relations and authority has been a deep rooted problem since the founding of this nation. By enslaving Africans and other ethnicities, wealthy white forced them to long hard toils under the sun. Fast forward to the middle 19th century and those enslaved have been set free yet those people are still being oppressed. Fast forward now to the middle 20th century where one hundred†¦show more content†¦Not only that, but constantly churning out stories about the incident every hour until it ceases to matter to them anymore. The media do not realize the problems created by the haphazard ways of this kind of reporting. In t he 1950’s, media could be said as being the polar opposite of today. The 1950’s were a time in which televised news sources were not as frequent and plentiful as they are now. One particular situation that needs to be pointed out happened right in the city of Montgomery, known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, shows just how effective media can be when the priority is to give the news without hyperbole or exaggeration. Going to Randall Kennedy’s Yale Law article, the writer describes the climate of the south at this time period â€Å"Segregation was a way of life determined in large part by whites who virtually monopolized state power and used that power to subjugate blacks. (Kennedy)† This is what minorities went through in the beautiful state of Alabama. The media effectively allowed the visual representation of what was happening in Montgomery at the time. Of course, there were some bias because of the majority white journalists at the time, but it was difficult to state anything other than the truth with video evidence and pictur e evidence proving the reality. Media is such a privilege in