For this post we had to put two texts in Gen-AI and relay what we’ve found, so I just used ChatGPT since that’s the most common program used. It brought up a point about menopause serving as a loss of femininity, which is something I considered but didn’t expect for it to have considered, so that was interesting. For Broughton’s “Mrs. Smith Longmainis” it mentioned that Mrs. Smith was treated as fragile and unstable which was gradually reducing her sense of self, and I agree with that. If any individual were constantly treated as though they were abnormal it would be isolating. Humans require connection in order to thrive and grow and to have better quality of life, so when you have the opposite going on it’s not strange to have a lapse in judgement or an emotional response. ChatGPT also brought up the psychological elements of the text revolving Mrs. Smith’s mental health and how the expectations of others caused her to feel mentally and physically constrained, but emotionally conflicted.
This is most definitely the case in today’s society. I can’t tell you how many social media posts I’ve seen arguing that humans were never supposed to have this much access to one another, which is a downside to technology. Everyone’s opinion, regardless of if you want it or not, can be expressed through faceless accounts on social media. You could jump down a rabbit hole as to why that’s dangerous and find hundreds of reasons.
If Mrs. Smith had access to social media, I wonder what her feed would look like. It can be a hit or a miss, sometimes, but you’ll always encounter people adamantly pressing their opinion to the forefront of any post. In that same respect some people argue that we should not be able to see our own faces so much because we overanalyze every detail. After analyzing it we reanalyze based on the current trends and beauty standards and still wind up unhappy. So if women in the 1800s felt as though they were no longer valuable after they reached a certain age, it’s not too surprising that we’re still facing that same issue centuries later. As a woman, your own definition of femininity changes as you age. In my opinion you can stretch that word to encompass any number of qualities, but as a person you always have value.
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