Elisa New: evaluation

Transcript context

…A question related to your mentor, or one of your mentors, Ann Douglas. As you know, the mid- to late 19th century was, at the time, seen as an era of a kind of extreme feminization. I don’t think we today would view it in those terms, but they did. Do you see any parallels between that time and the world today? That’s a very interesting question. That was a curveball. Thinking back to my wonderful mentor’s work, The Feminization of American Culture, where Ann Douglas offered a critique of a sentimentalization of female experience that excluded, in her mind, and ended up marginalizing whole other orders of experience like that so brilliantly exposited by Herman Melville. The literature of the period tended to exclude the experience of the outside world and to focus on the experiences most women had within the domestic realm. Do I think that right now we are in a period of feminization? Once again, things are happening so fast that I don’t know. We’re certainly in one of those moments when we are reckoning, in all sorts of ways that contradict each other, with what it is to be men, women, or in-between. What’s a book you would recommend for people to read about America that would help them understand this country that’s maybe not so well known?…

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