What is femininity ?

The struggle with woman hood is an apparent them in all of the Wolfe pieces. The main characters struggle with the concept of being a woman, and what that means for them, and how society dictates womanhood at that particular time. It is a struggle that has been shared for hundreds of years, and it is an issue that De Beauvoir and other feminist try to address.
A room of one’s own by Virginia Wolf addresses the role of the woman in society. Here we see the distinct interaction between the main character and the role of women in her natural environment. When she is run off the road usually occupied by male scholars, shows that there is a separate world that men exist in that women are not a part of. De Beauvoir states the “this one, the myth of woman sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition namely, the division of humanity into two classes of individual”. Society creates this separation between man and women, two different realms from which they interact, there is nothing inherent about the differences but we assume that there is some truth to these myths and therefore validates them through our actions.
The beadle, whose status is below the average male citizen, is examples that not only are women subordinate to men, they are subordinate to all men no matter the class.
Wolfe goes on to speak about the woman position as land owners, everything that they own any wealth that they were to incur belongs to there husbands, meaning that Women were inherently property of there husbands, to do with as they please. As De Beauvoir said “to identify woman with Altruism is to guarantee to man absolute rights in her devotion, it is to impose on women a categorical imperative.” The fact that a woman’s earning are the property of her husband, deterred many woman from going after lives of wealth and preferred to take on roles of common housewives or mothers.
In the Introduction and the New Dress, the two main character struggle with their identity and self confidence they look for consolation in others to redeem there accomplishments or bold decisions.
In the Introduction Lily is proud of her essay, three red stars, but she also struggles with being inferior to other people which results in her shyness. She uses her accomplishment on the essay as a morale booster, putting the concept in her head that maybe she is just as good as anyone else. It is not until Lily meets Bob Brinsley that she convinces her self that she will never compare to him as man, her meager essay is nothing compared to his Shakespearian lineage. In my opinion it seems as if Bob metaphorically rapes Lily, stripping her of her character, or as she says “she felt like a naked wretch who having sought shelter in some shady garden is turned out...” . Bob strips her of who she is, strips her of her accomplishments and makes her want to recede back into her reclusive hermit ways.
In The New Dress Mabel tries to be more feminine, more woman like compared to the rest of the conformist of the time who try to hide what they have, hide there womanhood under tons of makeup. Mabel wants to do the opposite she wants to let it all out, but the problem is, to me, Mabel is unhappy because she does not look like the other woman. She does not have the prowess that she was hoping the dress would have given her. The dress also plays as a façade, what woman hood and femininity are supposed to look like. This may play into another of Mables problem, the dress is not fulfilling her desire to be a woman, that even with the dress she is still missing that extra piece that will truly make her a woman.
So the Question that I seem to find in all the readings is what is feminism and who is decide what it is to be feminine ?

What femininity is would be hard for me answer, I think I would best be able to answer what it is not. Being feminine is not determined by man, the standards for being a woman should not and can not be determined by man because it constantly puts woman at a disadvantaged. Instead of being described by what they can do, they are described by the functions of men that woman can not do. It was once said that men are the positive and the neutral, woman are just the negative, and it is on this scale that womanhood is graded, everything that man is not.

P.s. I can not remember who coined the line men are the positive and the neutral, I think it was Adrian Reich, or Firestone.