Skip to main content

Representations of women over time

By

My first impression on this topic is that the way women have been represented has changed considerably over time.  I will be interested to see how that representation has changed.

Over the last 200 years it appears that women have moved from a position of very few rights to having equal rights with men. There were so many influential women leaders in history (eg. Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth and Catherine the Great), yet women had to fight hard in recent times for their rights. Did women have more rights and a more prominent position in society hundreds of years ago but something happened to reduce those rights? Did women’s rights change due to religion, or due to the role of women in times of warfare?

There has been a shift in the way in which women have been represented in movies and theatre over time.  There are many more female leads than in the past eg. Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Vera – the chief detective, Judy Dench as the boss known as “M” in James Bond. 
 Image result for katniss everdeen

This contrasts with earlier films in which women are more commonly the “love interest”, or the “Damsel in Distress”.  In Shakespeare’s plays hundreds of years ago, female characters were played by men. In this case women were represented by men.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best Actress 1976 + 1991 Academy Awards

By
A character analysis and comparison of the roles demonstrated in  the Best Actress category at the 1976 and 1991 Academy Awards  Background The two films under the spotlight are One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Misery (1990). Both films are film adaptations of the novels of the same titles. I decided to analyse the Best Actress Academy Award as this is in my opinion what Hollywood decides as the peak of female representation of that year and such deserves to be rewarded for its achievements. I chose too analyse these two films as they both feature a Woman as a Nurse and as the main antagonist of the films. 15 years was also a nice time gap that would create a more interesting and apparent difference in representation instead of a smaller time gap of only a few years. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Background information about the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) is a film adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same title by Ken Kesey. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Girl With A Pearl Earring

By
Girl With A Pearl Earring Johanne Vermeers' Girl with a Pearl Earring Painting In the novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" the story rotates around the character "Griet" and her life as a maid for the painter Johannes Vermeers' family, and all the ups and downs of her life working for them, including when Vermeer paints her for his, now world famous, painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Griet comes from a protestant family with three children (Griet (15/16), her younger brother Frans (~14-15) and her younger sister Agnes (~12)) living in the dutch town of Deflt which is shown as a relatively small town. Griets' family falls to poverty after her father is blinded in an accident with a kiln explosion, taking his craft of tile-painting when he is blinded. This means Griet has to go and work for the Vermeers' where the painter needs a maid who can clean without moving anything and Griets parents volunteer her. There are a lot of small...
Post a Comment
Read more
By
Women Over Time Even before this unit, the representation of women had been a topic I was interested in. With social media nowadays, the subject comes up even more often, and has sparked many debates and protests. However, when the unit began, I realised that the sexism experienced by women was still a major ongoing problem in our society. Women are often portrayed as inferior to men. They are objectified, and pressurised to be physically beautiful, because society has forced them into believing that that is their role. Society has guided them from a young age, through books and movies and toys, to care more about their appearance than their aspirations and goals. Men, on the other hand, had whatever they needed to achieve their dreams from a young age. Wanted to become a police officer? Buy a toy gun. Wanted to be an explorer? Grab a pair of binoculars. And if a girl wanted to become any of those things, buying anything from the boys' section was frowned upon by society. Unle...
Post a Comment
Read more