Day 5: Study Update

I'm quite pleased with my work yesterday. I didn't tot an awful lot up, at 1097 yesterday (though it isn't too bad) but I did finish my Physics revision.

I know, I know... I'm strange: that's the highlight of my week. And its not as if I'm done with it, I will have to keep doing past-papers on it, and occasionally read through my study guide. And I will probably have to dust about that electromagnetism a bit more. But that sense of satisfaction, and that sense of achievement, when you finish something, is just unmissable.

Its the same feeling I had when I finished the first draft of my novel. When I finished writing that six-page history essay on the parallels between Song China and the Abbasid Caliphate and Norman England (what's a word limit?). When I finish a particularly finicky bit of integration. That satisfaction you get from the little things- its better than staying up till midnight, or eating an entire box of ferro rochers, or buying that bottle of sweet pea and honeysuckle perfume you've been eyeing on Amazon (do you want to see how I celebrate my birthday...). Its even better than browsing nineteenth century paintings of women wearing the most beautiful gowns you've ever seen (want to see how I spend my school break-times...)

I haven't the slightest idea how girls my age in the nineteenth century might have pursued this feeling of satisfaction. They couldn't exactly study History and English Literature and Latin and Maths and Sciences like their brothers did. Older people, I suppose, get that satisfaction from doing a job they love; but in the nineteenth century, that wasn't an opportunity for upper-class women either, and I can't imagine suffocating in a factory being rewarding. Perhaps it helped if one had a penchant for foreign languages, or were musically inclined, or just a really good seamstress.

I know it might be a trivial thing in the face of the more blatant misogyny, but I've always really quite detested the criticism so rampant in nineteenth century literature of 'bluestockings'. Even supposedly revolutionary authors like Miss Austen make it their personal duty to comdemn these creatures with their noses in books, actually daring to pursue academia (a bit of hypocrisy on the part of an authoress, perhaps). I know too many people like Mary Bennet, and I wholeheartedly support Austen's deliciously vengeful portrayal of her, but it doesn't sit right with me that she is the only academic woman in all six volumes.

I'm probably boring you to death, at this point, but it is just a thought. Do you like Academia? Do you think you would be inhibited by gender/ racial/ class factors in the nineteenth century?