Whatever The Case
Dear woman have the spirit of Lily
Article by: Tshegofatso Rasekgotoma
Breaking into
the gender
stereotyped war
streets of any job
industry is a rather daunting and
impossible veiled thing to do, especially if
you are a woman. Throughout history,
women have always lagged behind in
industries that were thought to be meant
for the male counterparts. The society had,
from the beginning of time created a
phantom about the place of the woman in
the society, which is inheriting the
domestic skills from their mothers so that
they themselves, can become better and
well equipped wives.
Women were deemed less capable of
delivering the best results as men in jobs
that were concluded to be men's, and then
given five stars for folding cardigans,
chopping carrots and onions, as well as
sweeping the dust out of the house. The
idea that women belonged to a certain
corner of the societal quilt influenced the
destructive power of the males upon the
creative abilities of the women.
“Women can't paint, women can't write ...”these are the words uttered by Mr. Tansel,
a character in the 1927 novel tiled 'To the
Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf, the words
were directed to a female character called
www.megaartists.co.za
Lily, a female artist passionate about
painting, these made Lily to constantly
worry about her paintings being rejected
or not taken serious. The words of Mr.
Tansey insinuated that women are not
competent in neither painting nor writing
and as a result Lily was haunted by these
words so heranxieties heightened. She
does, however, throughout the novel,
proves to be more passionate and
determined to create art through painting,
and at the end of the novel ends up
evolving from the woman who is unsure
about her work to a woman who achieves
her vision, and most importantly,
overcomes her anxieties and allows
herself to be and create, caring not about
how her work will be received.
Somewhere, out there, lives a woman
whose finger tips are harboring away on
the keyboard to create strings of
consonants and vowels which will
eventually birth chapters of a book, a pen
breathing life to ink on a page or a
paintbrush encouraging colors to mix and
blend and speak with the world- but
engulfed by fear of being told that they and
their work are not good enough, as Lily is
told in the novel by Mr. Tansel.
It is no secret that we are, in the 21st
century, still living in a society that still
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