zinn chapter 9 reflection

The book is linked: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistor…

Write a 500 words reflection on chapter 9.

after reading the chapter called the intimately repressed, what is your reaction to what you have just learned?

use your own response, use a qoute, tell us what you are learning from the chapter. You do not need to all respond to my example below.

below is my example on how to begin writing a Zinn discussion paper.

perhaps respond to this prompt, Zinn wrote

Julia Spruill describes the woman’s legal situation in the colonial period: ”The husband’s control over the wife’s person extended to the right of giving her chastisement. . .. But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife. . . .”

As for property: “Besides absolute possession of his wife’s personal property and a life estate in her lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by her labor. . . . Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband and wife belonged to the husband.”

Zinn uses his historical sources to describe a world so far removed from our own, that it is difficult to relate to or to even fairly understand. He informs us that women, wives, were owned by their husbands. Their income, their bodies, their lands. Now some of this is not that unusual. Julia Spruill tells us that her body was something that she had to share with her husband, and with no one else. She uses the word chastisement, which tells us that he had control over her sexuality. No marriage could long survive without husband and wife being true to each other, so it would be extremely difficult for her is she fell in love with someone else. The rights to divorce did not belong to her. The only thing that seems to separate her from being or feeling like a slave, is the fact that her husband could not cause her permanent injury or death. A slave could be permanently injured or killed. But not a wife.