In Taming of The Shrew, Act 1 we see how Katherine and Bianca are being forced into marriage by their father. Bianca does not seem to mind so much but not everyone would enjoy having their family not only force them into marriage, but pick out a husband for them such as Bianca’s sister Katherine. Katherine is very outspoken, confident and reluctant to have others in her life decide her future. The men in the play say Katherine’s outspoken personality holds her back from having anyone approach her and possibly court her. What happens when a woman’s high education level becomes the reason why a man is afraid to build a relationship with her?
The M.R.S. and the Ph.D. starts off by saying, “TODAY women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and more than half of master’s and Ph.D.’s which should make any woman proud. This however would hold women back from getting married from 1940 – 1970 when women were told they were too educated to marry. Luckily we have come a long way from this time period where women had to put their education aside in order to marry.
Act 1 of Taming of The Shrew not only shows us the amount of growth women have made but also the importance of understanding how reading what was going on during a time period such as Shakespeare’s, gives us an insight as to why women are now more outspoken and continue to push the envelope to be heard and be respected.
Melissa, you are absolutely right to connect the male fear and dislike of an outspoken woman portrayed by Shakespeare to the corresponding male fear of marrying an educated woman that Stephanie Coontz’s article (published February 11, 2012) describes as having existed prior to and during the 20th century.
One citation from Coontz’s article that very effectively supports this point is: “Men in the postwar period were threatened by the thought of a woman with more or even as much education as they had. One man who taught at a women’s college in the 1950s told me his colleagues used to joke that once they knew a woman had earned a Ph.D., they didn’t even need to ask what she had specialized in: clearly, it was in “Putting Hubby Down.” ”
One concern: you need to take special care with citations and sources. You don’t mention the name of the author of the Times article (which is very important) or the date when it was published, and while you cite its first line, you use quotation marks only at the beginning of the citation, and your reader does not know where the citation ends. And you cite nothing from The Taming of the Shrew, the other text under consideration.
The blog posts are where we begin to practice citing from the texts we discuss so that your midterm and final papers can make arguments that are based on skillful citations. It’s important to use citations effectively in each blog post.