February

In all our talks about the feminist movement, I have been repeatedly surprised with the things that men and women actually believed. My favorite belief was that women, just because they were women, experienced regular and temporary periods of insanity. Obviously, these outbreaks of insanity were during a women's "time of the month," but the mentality went even further to disregard women going through post-partum depression, as shown in The Yellow Wallpaper. This mindset seems ridiculous to me. Lately, however, I was watching Dr. Oz (my Mom's favorite), and he had a special on hysterectomies. Dr. Oz was talking about how many women find hysterectomies very difficult to deal with, and that there are others way to get rid of problems without having the uterus completely removed. Something interesting that he mentioned was that the word "hysterectomy" actually derived from the belief that the uterus is the source of a woman's hysteria. He went on to say that even though we have moved forward from that mindset, he can still see lingering branches of thought. Dr. Oz said that many people have the belief that a woman having her uterus removed is not a big deal; if it doesn't work, why keep it? If you don't want any more kids, why do you need it? But he pointed out that men don't willingly go to get their penises chopped off; getting a penis removed is taking away a man's true manhood. Evidently, there is still a disconnect between men and women.
I just thought that Dr. Oz's comment was very interesting, and it related to our unit very well. it goes to show that even though we have moved forward, there are still lingering effects, beliefs, and stereotypes.