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Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Naomi Wolf : ‘A Woman’s Place’ (1)
Naomi Wolf : ‘A Woman’s Place’ (1)
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(1)
Naomi Wolf, A Woman's Place.
(2)
Even the best of revolutions can go awry when we internalize the attitudes we are fighting.
(3)
The class of 1992 is graduating into a violent backlash against the advances women have made over the last 20 years.
(4)
This backlash ranges from a senator using The Exorcist against Anita Hill to beer commercials with the Swedish bikini team.
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Today I want to give you a backlash Survival kit, a four step manual to keep the Dragons from taking up residence inside your own heads.
(6)
My own commencement at Yale eight years ago was the graduation from hell.
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The speaker was **** Cavett, rumored to have been our president's brother in an allmale secret society.
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Mr.
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Cavett took the microphone and paled at the sight of hundreds of female about to be Yale graduates.
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When I was a graduate, I recall, he said, there were no women.
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The women went to Vassar.
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At Vassar, they had nude photographs taken of the women in gym class to check their posture.
(13)
One year the photos were stolen and turned up for sale in New Haven's red light district, his punchline.
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The photos found no buyers.
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I'll never forget that moment.
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There we were, silent in our black gowns, our tassels, our brand new shoes.
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We dared not break the silence with hisses or booze out of respect for our families who'd come so far.
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And they kept still out of concern for us.
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Consciously or not, Mr.
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Cabot was using the Beauty Myth aspect of the backlash.
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When women come too close to masculine power, someone will draw critical attention to their bodies.
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We might be Elis, but we still wouldn't make *********** worth buying.
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That afternoon, several hundred men were confirmed in the power of a powerful institution, but many of the women felt the shame of the powerless, the choking on silence, the complicity, the helplessness.
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We were orphaned from the institution.
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I want to give you the commencement talk that was denied to me.
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Message number one in your Survival kit redefine becoming a woman.
(27)
Today you have become women, but that sounds odd and ordinary usage.
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What is usually meant by You're a real woman now.
(29)
You become a woman when you menstruate for the first time, or when you lose your virginity, or when you have a child.
(30)
These biological definitions are very different from how we say boys become men.
(31)
One becomes a man when he undertakes responsibility or completes a quest.
(32)
But you too, in some ways more than your male friends graduating today, have moved into maturity through a solidarity quest for the adult self.