Question

Herstory: what do footbinding and witch burning tell us about women as a caste?

Dworkin tells a "herstory," which she describes as "the underbelly of history." She centres this herstory on two practices: footbinding and witchburning. Why might she focus on these particular practices? What do they have in common? What do they tell us about women as a caste?

(word limit: around 250)

Answer 1

Andrea brings before our psyche, age-old practices of witch burning and Chinese foot binding, two of the cultural phenomena that were the manifestation of men’s hatred for their opposite sex. Men were portrayed as bewitched and subjected to women’s evil designs; they were terrified victims and needed to be protected. Women were described as being more bitter than death. The psychical, intellectual and spiritual dehumanization of women perpetuated their oppression. ”The chinese foot binding didn’t formalize existing differences, it created them. One sex became male by virtue of making the other sex completely polar to itself, the female,” remarked Andrea.

She attacks the standards of beauty, set for women and opposes the tolerance of pain and romanticisation of that pain. It is harsh and accurate in depicting everyday lives of women under patriarchy and misogyny. The restrictions on female mobility, intellect and psyche imposed on women by men who built the society as per their convenience have been discussed by the author.

Dworkin concluded that “we are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed... . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action” (1974, 155). For Dworkin, culture was composed of models, or stories, that dictated and limited human possibilities. Stories, narratives, and myths were the source of culture and thus the very essence of cultural and behavioral programming. This programming was the problem, and it could only be addressed through culture, the primary example of which was literature.