Marilyn Frye uses the birdcage to illustrate how women’s oppression is not obvious to close scrutiny, but rather it requires that you step back and view the larger object as a whole. She explains that whilst women do not appear to be oppressed, if you look at an individual or assess actions upon an individual, they are in fact being oppressed as the whole group, ‘women’. Frye uses the example of the ‘door-opening’ to illustrate her point. She concludes that this event marks women as incapable because it is part of a ritualistic pattern instead of being just a singular gallant gesture.
Frye then goes on to define oppression a little more thoroughly. She states that “If an individual is oppressed, it is in virtue of being a member of a group or category of people that is systematically reduced, molded, immobilized.” So a single person would be falling into a group of people that are being oppressed, Black, Chicano, gay. She points out that because women are......
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