I throughly enjoy the works of William Shakespeare. I love reading them, analyzing them, and seeing them performed. We’ve read the Tempest and Romeo and Juliet in class, and last year I even got the chance to see All’s Well That Ends Well performed live at the annual “Bard on the Beach” Shakespeare festival.

You can imagine my joy upon learning that we would be studying Shakespeare again, specifically the play The Taming of the Shrew. However, I was apprehensive, as I knew a bit about the play, and more specifically, the misogynistic themes of the play, mostly the idea that women need to be “tamed.” (And the fact that the movie 10 Things I Hate About You is based on it. But I didn’t know how accurate it was.)

There were several core competencies we focused on for this project: Identify Continuity and Change, Comprehending Texts, Designing Texts, and Using Resources ans Evidence from Various Sources. The driving question was “How can we use our study of The Taming of the Shrew to understand how much, yet how little, has changed for women?” The final project was an essay to answer that question. Read the final draft of mine!

The Taming of the Shrew and Motherhood Essay

I got the chance to learn about and practice using two of those competencies on our first milestone of this project. The assignment was to answer the question “How can the suffragette movement demonstrate both how much and how little has changed for women today?” by writing a paragraph. To do this milestone, we researched both the suffragette movement and had some in-class discussions about the treatment of women in real life and in the media. The competencies we used were “Identify Continuity and Change” and “Designing Texts.” I identified what has changed and what has stayed the same since the suffragette movement, and you can read the final assignment here.

Milestone 1

This was the first milestone that I did using our new Grade Contract system, and it was pretty difficult for me. I struggled to finish it exactly to the standard I wanted it to be, and when I handed it in, I was asked to revise it. This stressed me out a bit, as I only had a week to revise due to our new short schedule, but once I’d handed in the revision I felt better about it and felt like it was truly my best work.

A fun thing we did in this unit was watch a music video at the start of class, then decide as a class whether the video was sexist or not. (An example would be Cherry Pie, by Warrant. We couldn’t actually decide.) This activity was really eye-opening, as I had never really listened to the lyrics of some songs. It’s insane to me just how sexist lots of songs are, including extremely popular ones. One of the biggest issues with these music videos is the way they’re filmed; the camera only focuses on women’s bodies and not on their faces, but it’s the other way around for men. Having these discussions was really helpful for helping me formulate some of my ideas for the essay.

The next milestone began with reading (and watching!) the Taming of the Shrew! While we read the play, we took notes on specific quotes from it that related to women, and what it was like to be a woman at that time. These notes became the basis of the actual Milestone 2 assignment, which was a collection of all of our research.

While studying the Taming of the Shrew, I was actually struck by how sexist it was. At first glance, it’s a story about a terrible person being mean to another terrible person in the hopes of making her less terrible. There are a lot of other ways you could interpret this; some of them are better, and honestly some of them are worse. That was the point of having us each write our own essay.

I was also struck by closely 10 Things I Hate About You followed the plot, but that’s not super important.

Throughout the unit, we also were doing other reading assignments. Some were on the topic of women, to aid us in our research, and some were quality examples of essays that I eventually used to inspire the structure of my essay! I’d have to say that my favourite of all of the essays we read was Chicken-Hips, by Catherine Pigott. It told a really interesting story about culture shock and the way that we see ourselves and our bodies, and I was really inspired by it.

The third milestone was to create a poster with a group about the continuity and change of women’s rights over a certain decade. I worked with Jessie, Fraser, and Lucas, and our decade was the 1960s! The competencies for this milestone were the same as Milestone 1, as we were identifying what had changed for women over the course of the 1960s and what had stayed the same. The poster we made is designed to resemble a flower, as we felt that represented the “hippie” movement of the late 1960s that was pretty important. Some of the major events for women in the 1960s that we mentioned were the invention of birth control and the second-wave feminist movement, which advocated for women’s rights and social equality.

After completing this milestone, we presented our research to the class and watched each other’s presentations. I took notes on every presentation, and incorporated them into my Milestone 2 research document. I also included quotes and evidence from some of the essay readings we were assigned, and from other class discussions. The point of this milestone was to make the next milestone, which was actually coming up with an idea for the essay, easier, so I also added a section that summed up general themes that showed up in several different things I researched.

The last three milestones were all pretty similar; this is when we actually wrote the essays! The competencies we focused on for Milestone 4 were the same as the first three, but for Milestones 5 and 6 the competencies were “Designing Texts” and “Using Resources and Evidence from Various Sources.”

Milestone 4 was creating a thesis statement and essay outline. It took me a lot of drafting, narrowing down my ideas, and writing, but eventually I came up with my thesis statement: “Despite legal victories for women throughout the 20th century, the patriarchal ideal of women as mothers that has existed for centuries still exists and still keeps women confined in one role in society.”

Next was creating the outline. I wanted to do something creative with my essay, like some of the other essays we read. A lot of those ones began with a personal anecdote or some history the author had with the topic. I thought that would be a great way to connect with the reader of my essay, so I decided to start with an anecdote. It took me a while to actually come up with something, but I chose to explain how when my sister and I were kids, we had several baby dolls that we pretended to be the mothers of. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved those dolls, but I think this is a really good example of my point of young girls and women being expected to be moms.

For the rest of the essay, I decided to use some relevant quotes from the play and explain their relation to my thesis. Then, I described some important points from the history of feminism to prove my point. All of these quotes and points came from the “General Themes” section of my Milestone 2 research document, which in the end did really help me. The themes that I got from my research that were important were the idea that women must have children, and that women can try to rise up against oppression, but will ultimately fail.

In the conclusion, I tried to connect all of these points and outline the general themes further. I also decided to put my thesis statement in the conclusion, but the goal of the essay was that someone reading it would understand the thesis even before reaching the conclusion. I tried to do this by connecting several of the points to the societal expectation that women should be mothers, which made it flow better I think.

That was actually most of the work that I did for Milestones 5 and 6 too! I used the essay outline to write the essay, and then revised it several times. I really enjoyed this learning experience, as I got the chance to get a ton of feedback from my teacher and hand in several drafts!

Overall, I’m super proud of my essay, and I think the work I did on this essay will really help me with any writing and English assignments in the future!

Thanks for reading my blog post!