Blog 19: Landscape for a Good Woman / Carolyn Kay Steedman

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 Jordan Miles 
Blog 19:  Landscape for a Good Woman / Carolyn Kay Steedman  

The landscape for a Good Woman is Carolyn Kay Steedman's story she shares her and her mother's life and upbringing as a British Historian in the working class. She aims to share and bring light to the well-known assumptions of working-class life. She demonstrates her feminist views throughout her works and uses her own personal experiences to challenge the generalizations. She also describes many hardships that she faced growing up with her mother. She would often burden her by saying, "If it wasn't for you two I could be off somewhere else." These types of words clearly took a toll on Steedman because she would think, "we couldn't stay in the house or play on the doorstep without the fear of disturbing her. The house was full of her terrible tiredness and her terrible resentment, and I knew it was all my fault." (720). These sad feelings of being a burden are also carried on to the end of the piece when she talks about her sister now who has children of her own and says, "with children of her own and perhaps thereby with a clearer measure of what we lacked, tells me to recall a mother who never played with us, whose eruptions from irritation into violence were the most terrifying of experiences, and she is there, the figure of nightmares, though I do find it difficult to think about in this way." (724). This is a moving and powerful memoir that challenges the stereotypes and assumptions of working-class life and speaks to the resilience and strength of working-class women. 

Comments

  1. Rebeka OgrenMarch 13, 2023 at 6:47 AM

    This is a great interpretation of the reading. I fully agree that I think Steedman was describing the many challenges that her working-class family faced while she was a child. I also think that in her adulthood, she does an amazing job of reflecting back on the powers of these situations and using them to her advantage as a working woman herself. Although sad, these issues that she was faced with had they not have happened, wouldn't have turned her into the woman she was while writing this memoir.

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