Thinking about the world in B&W

Its a hard truth to swallow that there are people out there with very little experience, drive, or discovered imagination to write or speak about themselves and the world around them. It also sounds as if not only aren't there any tools for some, but no drive, nor even the slightest clue that such wonderful things exist. The silent "...women believe that the source of self-knowledge is lodged in others." (Belenky, 31) Until page 32 I was wondering to myself "What makes these women silent, why have they no imagination, are they from this country?" Turns out they grew up mostly in isolation, living fairly cut-off from communities, had few friends, and violence rather than words was used to influence decisions in others in the home: childhoods with neither much play or dialogue. This is so sad and being faces with these facts is tough to swallow. 

I suppose I assumed these unfortunate situations existed, I just haven't been given so much information about how it can affect someone exposed to it, and I'm in a bit of a down mood as digestion of much of this material made me sad. It makes me feel lucky that I've had mostly good experiences in life, thinks a lot of us take for granted. Failing, or not being able to develop one's own voice and a sense of being able to talk and think things through sounds terrifying. It sounds like outer speech is important to identifying inner speech, and I'd never thought about it before because I thought we all had imaginations and complex thoughts going on in out minds, and for all situations. Its amazing to read about how detrimental the imbalances in life can be to our brains concerning complex language and thought developmental processes.

An example was given early on, the retrospective account of Bonnie and her daughter, where Bonnie just thought that her baby needed feeding when she cried, rather than considering possible alternate reasons. I imagine this was very early in her motherhood because it doesn't take long before you can smell the poop without question. I mention this because of my gender studies course I'm taking, where we've been debating a lot lately about whether or not women have natural motherly instincts. Some say yes, and some say no. I think most of what we know and do is learned behavior. I believe animals are more likely to have initial born instincts compared to human women and men. I think people assume that women are better with children because they are likely thinking about the road ahead and post-birth a lot more than fathers are, and the mother's forethought, or apparent readiness is observed as instinct, where I think mothers are just more prepared than many fathers. We assume, and are happy to do so, rather than to think more deeply about the possible reasons why many mothers are seemingly better with children than men. I think I just scribed-out some personal thoughts.

When I was young I had an amazing, wild imagination and still do at times. I even had categories of imagination. I think many of the people described in the reading must lack imaginination, such as the russian peasants mentioned early on int the reading - they said they could only comment or say something if they had actually done it, whereas I have no trouble talking or writing about things whether I've done it, or seen it, or not. Perhaps my own imagination is one of those learned activities, and maybe I wouldn't do it if I hadn't learned it from somewhere. I don't know.

I think its possible that the silent women may think blind obedience is necessary with authorities because they've never thought to question, or thought about reasons why they might want to question them - reasons why or ways in which person's of authority may abuse or misuse their power. They have no contextual experience in which to challenge it, leaving them powerless and unaware of their basic human rights. I think a lot of us have that problem with authority sometimes. Sometimes we do see the outside world in black and white.