Geoff Brackett, Executive Vice President, Shares Literary Perspective of Gender Gap

Dr. Geoffrey Brackett,

Executive Vice President,

Marist College

I am interested in following up on the discussion of the metaphors explored in this blog by giving a bit of the historical context for the ideas behind them. I am specifically interested in the expression of the idea of the “invisible” nature of the experience of the glass ceiling because it articulates the difficulty in causal linkage—the phenomenon exists but is not traceable. It also speaks to a broader, more cultural cause rather than an individual cause.

As a scholar of the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Period in English Literature, I thought I would share the fact that two of the most important intellectuals of that period, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake, wrestled with the issue.

Wollstonecraft was, as you may know, the mother of Mary Shelley (she died of puerperal fever after her daughter’s birth in 1797). She was the foremost female intellectual of the period, the first English intellectual to champion Thomas Paine publicly, and the author of a parallel work to his famous The Rights of Man, which she entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In that work, which was a sensation when it was published, she articulates the need for an economic foundation for women, predicated on education. One selection from a typically-entitled chapter will give you an idea of her thinking:

Chap. IX. Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society

Business of various kinds, they [women] might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from common and legal prostitution. Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the implied duties; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence, a most laudable one! sink them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution. For are not milliners and mantua-makers reckoned the next class? The few employments open to women, so far from being liberal, are menial; and when a superiour education enables them to take charge of the education of children as governesses, they are not treated like the tutors of sons, though even clerical tutors are not always treated in a manner calculated to render them respectable in the eyes of their pupils, to say nothing of the private comfort of the individual.

http://www.bartleby.com/144/9.html 

The “glass ceiling” metaphor also existed in this context, ne example of which was used by William Blake, the Romantic poet who was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft’s and even illustrated her volume of Original Stories from Real Life (1796). Here is the link to the illustration for “Oeconomy and Self-Denial are Necessary” (which gives you a sense of the tone of the whole):

http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=bb514.2.comb.06&java=yes 

Blake, similarly, was very much attuned to the issue of gender disparity in the world, and often alluded to it in his poetry. Remember, the Romantic Period was not only the dawn of a modern, individualized consciousness for poets, but also the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And it succeeded two world-revolutions in the American and French and overlapped the Napoleonic Wars. In two of Blake’s most famous poems from his Songs of Experience (1794), we see specific reference to the plight of women in his contemporary society. First, the poem “London” ends with the “youthful Harlot’s curse” blighting the “Marriage hearse,” which is often read as an indictment of economic and social deprivation of women at the time. Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” is a more interesting example of his articulation of this idea, however, because it anticipates the “invisible” characteristics of the “glass ceiling” metaphor.

O Rose thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

The adoption of the traditional masculine and feminine imagery—ostensibly using the garden landscape as a subject but with clear sexual overtones—illustrates the inherent problem seen both by Wollstonecraft and Blake: that something masculine and invisible is destroying the viability of the feminine flower. Like the “glass ceiling” in the corporate world, it is virtually impossible to trace, especially in the chaos of the surrounding environment. Nevertheless, it is there.

And so, while the current economic and organizational effects of the “glass ceiling” are still with us, the roots of the issue were actively discussed at the start of the historical economic period that launched the modern world.