Lydia Maria Child's Analysis

Lydia Maria Child makes a strong point when she speaks of how men objectify women in literature and base women’s value on how much the women’s beauty appeals to men. The objectification of women that Child speaks out against is quite apparent within the selected paragraph from James Fenimore Cooper’s work The Pioneers. Within just the description of Elizabeth that Cooper narrates from the viewpoint of Remarkable Pettibone, a reader will note the issues that Child mentions. Cooper’s paragraph is practically a collage of the descriptions that Child derides in her first paragraph. Child mentions that men objectify women through the use of descriptions such as “’rosy lips,’ and ‘melting eyes,’ and ‘voluptuous forms,’” (par. 1). Using similar descriptions, Cooper bases Remarkable’s opinion of Elizabeth off of her physical features such as her “spotless … forehead,” “long silken lashes,” and “cheeks burning with roses.” Cooper even suggests that Elizabeth’s’ nose would devalue her greatly if it neither added character nor was pleasing to look at. This value basis matches the ideals Child critiques when she mentions that “women [are] urged to simplicity and truthfulness, that they might become more pleasing” (par. 3). Cooper’s paragraph supports Child’s claim that men are the ones who write descriptions of women that follow a “chattel-principle”
1). Throughout Cooper’s entire paragraph are numerous examples of the kind of misogyny that Child spoke out against. In the end, a perceptive reading will have no trouble realizing that Cooper’s paragraph perfectly embodies the masculine portrayal of women in literature that Child so greatly despises: women are worth anything only so long as they are pleasing to