The Subjection of the Girl of the Period

Abstract

Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, I produced the following conceptual writing. I took alternating lines from works by two well-known 19th-century British authors, one an anti-feminist woman and the other a pro-feminist man, pasting them line-by-line into one document. The resulting mashup text presents a contradictory, destabilizing view of women’s rights and responsibilities. The back-and-forth of each author’s strong opinion from over 130 years ago takes on strange contemporary relevance reflective of women’s ongoing second-class status.