Blog 3

It could not be denied that one of the most main purposes of feminism is to set free of the large group of female. And this kind of “freedom” could be defined into two parts: the physical freedom and the emotional freedom.

To get the physical freedom, a woman must have an independent economic situation so that she does not need to rely on others and could go anywhere if she wants.  As illustrated in “Homophobia: A Weapon on Sexism”, “when battered women tell why they stayed with a batterer or why they returned to a batterer, over and over they say it was because they could not support themselves and their children financially, they had no skills for jobs, they could not get housing, transportation, medical care for their children” (Pharr 29), we could know that if women do not have the economic status strong enough to support them and their children, they could not leave their battering husband no matter how they want to do that. So it is impossible for a woman who could not live on herself to be free and independent physically. She must live with someone else even if she does not like that.

And to get the emotional freedom, a woman must possess the sense of equal and free in her mind which could not be achieved from others. In the book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” written by Harriet Jacobs, the first love story of the heroin Linda is a good example. Even though Linda was a slave, she still had the normal emotions as a free person. She fell in love with a free man, which seemed to be impossible in that situation, but that reflected the sense of free and equal hidden in her heart. Through the whole chapter seven (Jacobs 480), it fulfills the troubles and difficulties the two lovers had to be faced with and their struggles. The heroin knew that if she was married with her lover, she “could not still get off the control of her master” (Jacobs 486). What’s more, if they had children, the poor kids would “follow their mother’s fate” (Jacobs 486). Even though, the heroin still kept struggling with the cruel facts and had a horrible quarrel with her master, but she failed at last. During her struggling for her love and getting united with her lover, Linda’s spirit to be free and the will of enjoy the love as normal people has been strongly represented. Even if she was a slave, she still had the normal love and hate as an independent person, which had set her heart free at first and became the motivate power for her to struggle for her happiness. So if a woman wants to get the emotional free, she must free her heart with the spirit of equal, which could make her emotion beyond the gender, race, status, sexual orientation and something like that.

So in a nutshell, the independence of economic situation is necessary for a woman to get the physical freedom while the free and equal sense with the heart is essential for a woman to achieve the emotional freedom, and that is what the feminism kept working for during so many years.