"The right to become educated has been long sought after by women" -- and some of them even learn to avoid the passive voice! This site is a collaboration by students in a University of Texas class entitled "Rhetoric of Anglo-American Feminism." OK. It's well-designed and even somewhat informative -- and I say "somewhat" because the writing quality is so embarassingly poor I have to wonder what happened to the core curriculum. On the "Girlhood" page, we get this gem of an opener: "Girlhood represents a state of being a girl between the ages of 4 -16." Um...what? Over on the "Men" page, there's some competition from this punctuationally challenged whopper: "Fear; that is driving force behind many of the ills patriarchal society has placed upon women." :-0

It then devolves into shameless padding for length, using tried and true methods like repetition ("All of us have certain ideas about ourselves, and our basic worth as a person. This is called self-image. Your self-image is your picture of yourself.") and plagiarizing run-on sentences ("As in today’s society culturally held beliefs of idealized family life and structured gender roles worked against Victorian feminists’ desire to change the way women were defined in society, especially according to law dealing with the relations between husband and wife in the domestic sphere of the family.") And for the final kicker, stop by the Women and Footwear page ("One Step At A Time" -- I get it!) for this boggler: "Inevitably, the path towards equality will always be arduous, but today no woman has to take another step in that path and face the world in bad shoes again."

I know it's an overview, it's not a Women's Studies class (it's a rhetorical reasoning class, yikes), it's just student work product, and I don't want to discourage young feminist inquiry or an improvement in writing skills...but come on! I wrote better stuff than this in high school -- and my parents had to study Latin, Greek, and declamation, for Pete's sake. I weep for the future -- oh god, I'm starting to sound like Harold Bloom!