it takes one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine Negress without wishing to man an English woman of her?
Which of the following choices correctly explains the meaning behind this line?
Women don't find black women as attractive, as men do
Women don't have the same need as men to go unnoticed in the world
Women don't have the same need as men to leave some sort of lasting impression in the world <-- or B
White women and black women in England often experienced conflict
If there is an advantage to being a woman AS OPPOSED TO BEING A MAN, it's that women don't want to make black women into Englishwomen? Why would a man want to make a black woman ("negress") into an Englishwoman? (As if she wasn't already?) White men find black women more attractive than white women do and wish to elevate them to a status equal to white women?
I don't know the source of this quotation, but it must be old. The implication that black women are inferior to white women is repulsive, but once was popular.
I'm so lost by what she mean by this. I keep reading it over and over.
"For, as Woolf well knows, no man of her era passing “a very fine negress” actually wishes to make an Englishwoman of her. Women of color in English society would definitely have been looked at with possessive eyes, but those eyes greedily wished to use those women for their own purposes: Servants, sex workers, slaves.
In asserting this “great advantage of being a woman,” Woolf also asserts a belief that women do not participate in the world of possession—perhaps a fair and true belief in her 20th-century milieu of recent women’s suffrage, where women had only ceased being their husband’s chattel by a handful of decades"
In context, yes, you were right. Out of context, the quotation could have easily meant something different.
D seems a bit close than the rest. I understand it as both are treated differently but not better(desirably/rightly). The sentence "It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to MAKE an Englishwoman of her" Being a women/Englishwomen she doesn't think it would make that big a difference and thus wouldn't wish it on another. Men might for their own reasons.
I think there's a better answer.
D? I'm unsure now if it's not B or C
Is it D?
Is there a typo (or maybe two) in that original question? It doesn't make sense to me.
This is from Virgina Woolf's Shakespeare's Sister.... and sorry I thought I typed it correctly!!!
" It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine Negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her"