Written by Aerial Whiting
A four-woman panel discussed the development of the feminine voice Nov. 3 at the L.C. Sears Seminar “In Between the Lines: The Narrative of the Feminine Voice” in Cone Chapel.
Dr. Clea Bunch, assistant history professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, joined assistant English professors Dr. Deveryle James and Dr. Stephanie Eddleman and associate history professor Dr. Julie Harris for the seminar.
Each professor took turns presenting a different aspect of the feminine voice. Bunch, who specializes in the history of the modern Middle East and U.S.-Middle Eastern relations, spoke on women in the Middle East; James spoke on women in film; Eddleman spoke on women in literature; and Harris spoke on women in history from the Dark Ages onward.
Americans have a lot of misconceptions about Middle Eastern women, Bunch said.
Many of the problems women in the Middle East face are problems of culture and tradition, not religion. People in the United States tend to focus on Iran and Saudi Arabia, where religion is part of government, so they see the restrictions there and attribute them to Islam, according to Bunch.
Also, according to Bunch, the Middle East is only a few decades behind the West in women’s rights.
“A lot of young [American] women don’t realize how recently women in our county didn’t have rights,” Bunch said.
She gave the example that in the 1960s and ’70s, married women could not get a credit card in their own name.
One of the reasons for the discrepancy that does exist is that because of the war on terror, people in the Middle East are preoccupied with safety concerns, Bunch said. Furthermore, they have economic concerns such as housing and food prices, and women’s rights are secondary to these issues.
The Middle East is a diverse area, according to Bunch. Clothing restrictions, for instance, range from very liberal in Lebanon to very covered in the Gulf States. She said she has even seen such combinations as women wearing hijab and jeans.
Women in the Middle East may face restrictions in terms of clothing, but even women in the U.S. have faced limitations on-screen.
Women in film used to be more limited in the roles they played, but now they run the “wide spectrum from victim to villain,” James said.
According to James, the first actresses were pretty or helpless, and men were the stars of film. Feminist film theory has contributed to the greater diversity of the roles women portray.
Initially only men directed movies, which affected the roles women played, James said. Eventually, however, female directors emerged, such as Agnès Varda in France and Sofia Coppola in the U.S. Other female directors include Kimberly Pierce and Nora Ephron, who directed “Sleepless in Seattle.”
While women’s roles have expanded, women continued to be sexualized in film, James said.
Prior to film, women faced obstacles in literature. Eddleman, who focused mainly on literature in the 18th century at the seminar, said that some of the first female writers were protest writers, and they were not accepted well.
According to Eddleman, women authors started to lose their voice, but their writing became more acceptable. Women began writing didactic novels, a novel form characteristic of the 18th century.
Some women found ways to protest through didactic novels, as Jane Austen did in her works. Eddleman said that she protested through her irony.
Other women would use an alias when they published their writing. For example, Mary Anne Evans assumed the pen name “George Eliot” for her works.
Women who used aliases had the advantage of “being judged as a writer rather than a ‘female writer,'” Eddleman said.
Further back in history, in the Middle Ages, most women were not concerned with making their voices heard in writing, Harris said. Literacy rates were considerably lower than they are today, and about 85 percent of the population was involved in agriculture, leaving a small number of people who had the opportunity to write. Literature was the domain of scribes, Harris said.
According to Harris, the Middle Ages were not particularly bad for women because they tend to fare well in a frontier society, which allows both men and women to work.
It was the Renaissance that generated inequality between women and men, Harris said. Emphasis shifted toward men supporting the family while the women stayed home, which limited their voice.
Concerning women in general, Eddleman said, “It’s like we’re having to carve out a space.” But from the tenor of the discussion, women are carving out that space slowly but surely.
