Research Paper Prospectus on "the mind has no gender"

1. This is a Seminar Paper Prospectus, (basically a mini critical analysis research paper) the requirements for this paper will be uploaded under "additional materials" as "Prospectus Requirements." 2. This needs to be MLA format. However no heading. (page number should be in the header.) Please look at owl purdue if you have more MLA format questions. 3. You will need to cite 9 sources. 4 primary text and 4 secondary text. I will upload some of them and I will state which are primary and which are secondary, this can be found under "additional materials." You should site all of these in a "works cited" page in the paper. AND quote at least once from each at least 4 of the sources (2 primary and 2 secondary). For the secondary text, give a quick summary of what the text is about (3 sentences). (you can look up secondary text, but they have to be scholarly and peer reviewed articles, or books and they can only be 10 years old, if you find any but don't have a way view them email me and I can see if i can get it through my school database.) However, if you choose to do that, you still need to cite the ones i uploaded, and quote at least one of them. Also, even if you do not quote all of the 9 sources I submit and you only quote 4, you still need to cite ALL 9 sources in the works cited page. Primary sources that can not be uploaded because they're books -> Eliza Haywood, "Fantomina." and John Cleland, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure." Secondary Sources that can not be uploaded because they're books -> Michel Foucault, "The History of Sexuality." 4.This is the main idea i want you to focus on, it is my thesis statement, but feel free to tweak it, or make it better. - "It is important to note that sex is a biological difference but gender is a social construct. Through these various 18th century readings, we come to understand that the mind does not possess any gender of it's own." 5. The main point is that THE MIND DOES NOT POSSESS ANY GENDER OF ITS OWN. Now in order to prove that you must give examples from the text, mainly primary text and then back it up with secondary text. (e.g., "In 'The Female Husband' by Henry Fielding, gender was seen by Hamilton as a social relation that he challenged and broke the traditional barriers of." <- this is a primary text, I will upload it, you can use this sentences. Just quote an example of where you see this in the text and then explain how it proves that the mind has no gender. Also, if the mind has no gender, than what is gender and what are gender roles = basically gender is a performance, we see this both in primary text "Fantomina" and "The female husband" when they take on these different roles by assuming different disguises. Side note: its also good to bring up the opposing side, and argue why their wrong. 6. Questions you might want to extract and expand on that relate to the thesis: 6.1. How does forcing a mind to conform to societal demands harm a person, or a society? (where can we see it harming a person?) 6.2. How can (and why do) these constraints harm women's sexuality (and sexual desire)? 6.3. What kind of questions arise from masturbation, prostitution, Marriage, Heterosexuality, Homosexuality (queer sexuality) and pornography, regarding the idea that the mind has no gender? Do these categories (specify which ones) work for or against the idea that the mind has no gender, where can we see this? Do any theorist (secondary text) agree or disagree with this? Awrkoi 3 041 t S vie treUvAr-ctJA gr\pkNj, Lslo- Lroo . (\fuo CAGAieti\' late. (1e< 4L). 18. Educating Girls `THE BREEDING OF men were after a different manner of ways from those of women,' noted Margaret Cavendish around 163o, writing about the upbringing of herself and her brothers) Educational writers paid little attention to a curriculum for girls: it was as if the male experience comprised the whole human experience. Hezekiah Woodward devoted a single chapter of his 1640 tract A Childes Patrimony Laid Out upon the Good Culture of Tilling over his whole Man to girls' education. John Milton's educational system in the Tractate of Education, published in 1644, entirely ignored girls. Its goal was to produce 'brave men and worthy patriots', scorning all their 'childish and ill-taught qualities'.'- John Locke said a little more in some asides during the course of his major work on education and in the much-quoted letter he wrote to Mrs Clarke, the mother of children he tutored. His tirade against the vices of boys' public schools, for instance, includes an approving reference to the 'retirement and bashfulness' in which daughters were brought up. This could be modified into a 'becoming assurance' as they later learnt the art of conversation. He was concerned about the effects of too much sun on their tender skins, health and beauty. He stressed the necessity for early training at home by a dancing master to provide girls with 'fashion and easy comely motion'. Fathers should not beat them or even chide them: 'their governing and correcting, I think', he told Mrs Clarke, 'properly belongs to the mother'.3 Locke, in other words, was thoroughly orthodox. For the most part it simply did not cross men's minds that girls could be taught to reason as boys could. It was assumed that the developmental 1. Cited in L.A. Pollock, 'Teach her to Live under Obedience: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England', Continuity and Change 4 (1989), p. 238. 2. H.L. Smith, ' "All Men and Both Sexes": Concepts of Men's Development, Women's Education and Feminism in the Seventeenth Century', in D.C. Mall, ed., Man, God and Nature in the Enlightenment (London, 1989), pp. 75-7• 3. J.L. Axtell, ed., The Educational Writings of JohnLocke, (Cambridge, 1969) pp. 346-8. 364 EDUCATING GIRLS Lusey EAU L461q 365 stages of the young male provided a basis for a rigorous academic curriculum that was inapplicable to the female mind. These presupposi-tions emerge clearly in some passages of the instructions that the Earl of Northumberland wrote for his son Algernon Percy. 'Mark but women's education from their cradles', he wrote, 'and then shall we perceive that their bringings up can promise no deep insight into matters of knowledge but such as are soon got and easily learned.' Northumberland regarded girls as uneducable by nature: And this you may observe generally, that women at very young years are as grave and well fashioned, as ever after, for their outward carriage, making small progress in any learnings after; saving in love, a little craft and a little thriftiness, if they be so addicted out of disposition, hand-someness and trimness being the idol of their hearts, till time write deep wrinkles in their foreheads. There were occasionally women, he confessed, some of the most vir-tuous, who 'will cast their eyes upon the higher arguments of the scriptures', but this was not fundamentally what girls were made for. Their education was social and gender-specific. Northumberland provides a classic statement about parental aspirations in fashioning daughters for marriage: their care is to see them 'modest, neat, graceful, obedient', he declares, 'to draw on the likings of husbands, whereby fathers may put them off and provide them fortunes during the rest of their lives that must be got either when they are young or never, for then are they the prettiest'.4 We can compare Northumberland's view, which is undoubtedly characteristic of the English gentry as a whole, with a comment in the satirical pamphlet The Women's Sharp Revenge in 1640. This shows glimmerings of an understanding about the connection between male dominance and the male monopoly of education. Men's policy, it was alleged, had been to 'curb us of that benefit, by striving to keep us under and to make us men's mere vassals even unto posterity'.5 After 166o a small group of women like Bathsua Makin, Elizabeth Elstob and Mary Astell took up this critique of the English educational system, argued that women had the capacity to benefit from academic training, deplored the social education that was imposed upon them and insisted that they were being denied the possibility of personal development through intellectual enquiry.° The incapacity, as Mary Astell put it in 1696, 'if there be any, is acquired not natural'.' The attack focused upon the circularity of the 4. H. Markland, 'Instructions by Henry Percy touching the Management of his Estate', Archaeologia, XXVII (1838), pp. 330-31. 5. Cited in M.J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, 1987), p. 52. For John Taylor's authorship of The Women's Sharp Revenge see Capp, pp. 118-99. 6. See H.L. Smith, Reason's Disciples (Urbana, 1982), pp. 117-39, 192-201; H.L. Smith in Mall, ed., Man, God and Nature in the ,Enlfohtentnent op 747-R ii 11. v;nnaird, 'Mary This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)