Woman as Artifact: Sexual Scrip and a Female Education From th Reformation to Monique Witt

Abstract

This essay postulates that the gendering of women in Western societies has assumed a conscious, systematic, therefore educational form over the last 500 years. Given the proliferation of advice literature whose intention was to domesticate women into a new heterosexualized bourgeois family model which reflected a burgeoning capitalist socio-economic policy the sites of female experience have become increasingly privatized. This educational discourse, made potent through recourse to the proliferation of the printed word, emphasised a sexual script which reflected a trope of separate spheres which socially constructed women into social roles at the same time as it narrowed their productive contributions by emphasising their reproductive functions . The author analyses these historical processes then addresses radical feminist positions whose ideological assumptions suggest the transformative possibilities of a new sexual script. The conclusion to this argument is that such separatist views do not, in fact, effectively break with the discourse of the last centuries despite the deconstructionist reversal postulated by contemporary gender-theorists such as Monique Wittig.