I was most struck by the portion of this reading that discussed the exclusivity of the Brotherhood.  Dr. Bump clearly explains that

            "throughout his career, [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti sought to work in groups, and the Brotherhood was not even his first: he had             grown up in a group of four, two boys and two girls, educated and encouraged as equals whose individual strengths were             encouraged non-competitively.  Such mutuality was then second-nature for all the Rossettis and in forming the Brotherhood,             Dante Gabriel was substituting for the ultimately capitalistic model of individual artistic enterprise a communal, family model             with and without the religious overtones implicit in the name" (365). 

On a more simple level, this immediately reminded me of growing up in my family.  As I wrote on our first Jane Eyre discussion board, I grew up with two younger brothers and a younger sister.  My two male cousins lived a mile away from my house.  I had three girl cousins who lived about thirty minutes away, and three boy cousins and one girl cousin who moved every three years.  They generally lived somewhere overseas, either Cairo or London or Edinburgh.  All thirteen of us, today ranging in age from 11 to 25 would spend every summer together.  The four cousins who lived overseas would move into my family's basement for the summer.  We were never deliberately treated differently or unequally based on our age or gender or hometown.  But, over the years, differences emerged.  I watched as my cousins created exclusive fantasy football leagues that the girls weren't invited to join, and the girls did similar things.  While this small level of group development doesn't come close to the magnitude of excluding the two Rossetti girls from the Brotherhood, it relates a similar level of socialization.  I believe my family's differences were fueled by personality and stereotype.  Eventually, the boys invited those of us with interests in football to join their league.  But, was Dante Rossetti's exclusion fueled by this understanding of personality or competition?  How could socialization and adolescence have played into the development of the Brotherhood.

            This reading also made me think about the exclusivity of language.  We read that "simply by choosing the name 'Brotherhood' Danta Gabriel Rossetti made it clear that there would be no question of including Christina Rossetti or any other woman, no matter how well qualified she might be" (365).  Is this a part of our culture that has changed?  Is language still this exclusive?  What makes some words that are gender biased apparently exclusive, like the Brotherhood was, and others not so?