Please respond to both questions below with at least 500 words.

Then respond to at least 2 of your peers with comments containing a minimum of 150 words.

1. How does Traister dispel the myth that marriage will bring greater finances?

2. How does Hartman attend to the relationship between labor and intimacy?

response 1

From this week’s reading, I know better about the disadvantaged place females are in modern society. Despite the females and males take different social imagine, another obviously way show at salary females earn.from the article “For Poorer: Single Women and Sexism, Racism, and Poverty” Rebecca Traister points out that “ for centuries, women who did not find economic shelter with husbands often discovered themselves nonetheless reliant on men”(Rebecca Traister p,183). That indicated two problems, women tend to lose their job or just maintain daily chore during the days when they get married, secondly just because females can’t get the better salary during the society so they quit. Males still in control, which means females can’t take the house financial problem, thus dispelling the myth that marriage will bring greater finances. Another aspect of fatherhood bonus and motherhood penalty. According to the article that “women who are pregnant or have young children find it harder than childless workers to switch jobs”(Rebecca Traister p,189). During the marriage people who want children carry much more pressure, first, they have to buy a house and car which if it’s better near the school, second females have to work to reduce the cost, sustain the family. Now females with children or pregnant are hardly to find a job that makes financial even worse. Males make enough salary really depends on where they work and what position they are. Never mention the divorce can bring to single mothers.

From the article “wayward lives,  beautiful experiments Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval” shows the black people especially girls living the environment pressure them to be sexual worker. Saidiya Hartman asserts “Girl, where you headed?” Each new deprivation raises doubts about when freedom is going to come”(Saidiya Hartman p,10), it directly shows black girls much like prisoners or labors, trying to make life there, but the social phenomenon bring them to another direction. “the brutal rebuff of “we don’t serve niggers”(Saidiya Hartman p,8) not just the hope of black people all the black people are rejected. Therefore, less thing for girls to do foe survive, intimacy just become a skill for black girls to approach life. Things may betray moral, but it doesn’t give them much choice. “squalor and tawdry finery, dwell the negroes leading their lighthearted lives of pleasure, confusion, music, noise, and fierce fights”(Saidiya Hartman p,6) the life is beyond girls can take, people going to seek joy amidst sorrow, enjoy anything they can grab, the happiness or love. They are labors too, labor working for suffering. Then intimacy for them is placebo, they seek for the join as hope, it is horribly beautiful. They cleaved to and cast-off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist and revised the meaning of marriage. Also they not really labors, they rejected too, they may don’t know how to live, but they knew what’s the best for them. long with this, it will be a vicious circle for black girls their beauty only being abuse and twist.

 response 2

This week’s reading is very interesting and thought provoking, as it focuses on the process of women trying to fight against the social norms. These materials are closely related to my final project, which relates to the social oppressions that Chinese women in marriage are currently confronting. In the reading, I saw the similar experience that both Chinese women and Black women have. In the Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman tells a story about the the process of Black women “made a way out of no way”, facing the excessive abuse and torture enacted on their bodies. It is heartbreaking that Black women’s efforts in fighting against social oppressions often brought only censure, repression, violence and arrest. Their intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. Black women were vastly harassed and confined on suspicions of future criminality. They are charged for ridiculous crimes, such as “failed adjustment” or “potential prostitute.” As Saidiya Hartman writes, in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, “few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl. They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures.” These minor characters’ voices are often time omitted and forgot by the general public, but they extremely important for us to examine the unbearable discriminations that women are facing and will be facing in the future, thus allowing us to further address these issues. 

Wrestling with the tough question-what a free life is- increasing number of women are starting to fight against the uneven social norms in the current society. In Rebecca Traister’s article, For Poorer: Single Women and Sexism, Racism and Poverty, we can see that with the same education and working experience, men out-wage women in every category(Traister, 183). The article mentions about the finance factor that alters current women’s altitude towards marriage. Agreeing with this idea, I also talked about it in my writing, in Chinese marriage, because of the financial differences, whenever the family comes to the decision who need to take care of the children or family, without any hesitation, women is always the one that has to be sacrificed. From the moment that they submissively comply with the stereotypes and restrain themselves inside of home, they lose their identity as independent women but are permanently bonded and suppressed by their marriage. The suffocating stereotypes prevailing in China forges an invisible jail that constrains and traps every woman. The overwhelming pressure from the traditional norms pushes them into marriage and strips women’s voice by confining them in the house using social morality. But as more women are trying to obtain a higher education and step as well as maintain in the workforce. This issue has been gradually fixed, independent women start to break the social confinement that women have to get married as soon as possible and stay inside the house. They manage to enjoy their own free life and prioritize their own wants.