Beginning in 1850 Abby Price, one of the forerunners of the Women’s Rights Movement, was a spokesperson for women and their freedom.  One of the rights she lobbied for was economic independence.  She felt that without it women would never have personal, legal or physical freedom.  “She demanded equal pay for equal work, and she demanded what we now call comparable worth.”  (Ceniza 63).

Over one hundred years later women still had to stand up for their rights for equal pay for equal work.  Click on the first link below to see a Public Service Ad from the 1960’s.  Use the back arrow to return to blog.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5699898249406405833&ei=TMgPS_6bFI6-rALNsOwr&q=1960+tv+commercials#

Price “did not feel that the home rewarded women with the high sense of morality and spirituality that her society kept telling her it did.  She saw such claims as bogus, as ways to flatter women in order to keep them in their place.”  (63). 

Although Walt Whitman valued motherhood, he valued women as equal to men and able to do whatever they wanted.  He believed that if women pursued interests outside the home they would be more satisfied and happier with their domestic responsibilities. And he felt women should have the right to choose how they wanted to spend their time.

Once again, over one hundred years later, women are facing the same challenges.  In the next ad we hear a male voice telling working women that they need to be themselves once in a while and that is done through baking.  Again, use the back arrow to return to post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACUxDhVxcP4

Both Whitman and the members of the feminist movement wanted women out in the real world.  In Democratic Vistas Whitman wrote, ” – but great, at any rate, as man, in all departments; or, rather, capable of being so, soon as they realize it, and can bring themselves to give up toys and fictions, and launch forth, as men do, amid real, independent, stormy life.”  He wanted women to become “robust equals and workers.”  (222). 

Women like Abby Price, Paulina Davis and Ernestine Rose devoted their lives to the liberation of women.  These women, along with Whitman, spoke and wrote for the freedom that women were entitled to.  Men of the 19th century did not take them seriously, reporting in newspapers about the fashions worn at the women’s conventions instead of the content of the speeches.  And, once again, over one hundred years later women are still being mocked.   The next link shows yet another ad that makes it clear that women can become working girls, but they are expected to fulfill their domestic duties at all times.   Once again, use the back arrow to return to post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4MwbVf5OA#

In the words of Sofia Petrillo, picture it:  Magnolia (that’s in NJ), Thursday, November 11, 2009, sometime between 9 and 9:30 pm.  I’ve just arrived home from my third evening on campus at Rutgers, Camden and have one thing on my mind, to get ahead in my Looking for Whitman work.  I have caught up in my other classes, except for finishing King Lear.  I am determined to finish my digital museum and my two new Whitman assignments by Sunday so I can focus on Shakespeare on Monday…..

I sit down at my computer and decide to check my email before beginning my project, only to find a note from a professor informing me that a paper I turned in a week ago was done incorrectly.  For the next five minutes I hesitate, think about calling it quits forever – this has been the most grueling semester I have ever had – change my mind and immediately get to work on correcting  the assignment.

I am now sitting on my couch, hunched over my coffee table, where my lap top happily resides, (I don’t recommend this….it kills the back and cuts off circulation to the legs.) when I realize it is 10 pm.  I have been working feverishly for only about 20 minutes, and although I don’t make it a habit to watch TV while working, I absolutely must turn it on.  I have allowed myself one last television indulgence since going back to school 4 years ago and it is on NOW.  So, I turn the volume down half way and go back to my paper.  I am pretty much tuning out the show I so desperately wanted to see…..and it’s the semi final episode of the season!  I am so much more interested in getting this paper done.  (This little problem has really put a glitch in  my exiting weekend plans!!!!!)  I ended up working on the paper until 2 am, so I cannot tell you if this actually happened during my show or some other time during those four hours at the computer, but all of a sudden my brain registers something my ears have vaguely heard.  Could this really be happening?  My eyes dart from my computer screen to the TV.  Low and behold this is really happening! Despite how fatigued they are, my ears have not deceived me.  It is not an illusion.  What I am hearing is “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and what I am seeing is the Levi commercial that we were just discussing in class the night before.  Who would have thunk it?  I stop, watch and attempt to register this timely event somewhere in my now overly taxed brain.  Writing about Walt Whitman and watching “his” commercial on TV at the same time; I could not have planned that in a millennium.

So what about the commercial?  My initial reaction is one of anger.  That is probably because the beginning of the ad is violent and confusing.  At first it appears that the characters are unsuccessfully attempting to fight off something scary, and then they appear to be running from something.  In the end they are just playing.  While the commercial’s cast of characters is made up of young people, and Walt is addressing his “tan-faced children” in the first line of the poem, that is where the similarity between the two ends.  By the fourth stanza of the poem Walt is telling his audience that they need to take up where their predecessors left off, “We take up the task eternal, and the burden andthe lesson.”  In the commercial the first three stanzas where Walt is beckoning to the youth to follow him, are read.   The fourth stanza, which is where Walt lets the youth know his intentionn for calling them, is completely skipped, then the second and third lines of the fifth stanza are read and it is over.  There are twenty-six stanzas in the poem.  How could anyone come to understand Walt’s full meaning in the poem from this ad?  How could anyone have the opportunity to appreciate what he was trying to do with his work by watching this one minute and three second video?  They cannot.  Unless the poem is read in its entirety it is not possible to understand its meaning.  The advertisers took a portion of this poem and attempted to fit it into their agenda.  They sorely missed the mark.  The visuals do not match Walt’s words or meaning.

The producers take a beautiful poem and mock it.  The characters in the commercial are not forging onward through uncharted territories, they are playing.  They are not depicted as doing anything to move this land forward or take their places in society as the previous generation winds down, as Walt is calling them to do in his poem.  In stanza twenty-three he specifically tells his readers that the call on their lives is not for fun, but for hard work.

                             Not for delectations sweet,

            Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,

            Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,

                            Pioneers! O pioneers!  (Kaplan 374)

Another aspect of this commercial that  is a mockery to Walt is the use of his work to sell clothing.  One of the characteristics about Wlat that has come through in my reasearch is that he was never interested in clothing as it pertained to the latest fashion or what was popular at the time.  I don’t see him as one who whould be honored to be linked to an advertisement for clothing.  Possibly if the Levis were presented in such a way that linked them to blazing uncharted territory, building a better world, or fighting against oppression he could appreciate his words being used to sell them.

As my grandmother used to say, Walt is probably turning over in his grave.  Anyone who compares what he was doing with his work to this commercial and says that television advertisers are the new poets is degrading him and his life.

I find one good thing about his ad; it gave me material for a Looking for Whitman blog post.

…..Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,

      Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men……

click here to read bibessay

whitman and feminism

The seventeenth national suffrage convention was held in Washington DC on January 20 – 22, 1885.  Susan B. Anthony, in her book History of Women Suffrage, notes “the custom of the newspaper reporters to give a detailed description of each one of the speakers.  The public was informed, one lady wore a small bonnet made of gaudy-colored birds’ wings; one spoke with a pretty lisp, was attired in a box-pleated satin skirt, velvet newbasque polonaise, hollyhock corsage bouquet; a large lady worea green cashmere dress with pink ribbons in her hair.  These extracts are taken verbatim from the best newspapers of the day.”

Walt spent his summers at the Stafford farm in Laurel Springs, NJ.

Click on one of the links to see it.  The link titled 315 E. Maple Ave. is the newest version of powerpoint.  The other is the 97-2003 version.

315 E. Maple Ave.              315 E. Maple Ave. 97