By changing the main focus of her paper and making over-generalizations about the way that all women feel, Bennetts takes away from the effectiveness of her argument and weakens her overall credibility. Bennetts starts her article by sympathizing with the struggle women go through while transitioning from working-woman to housewife. She blames the “corporate culture” for not being flexible enough to allow mothers to balance their responsibilities at work with their responsibilities at home (Bennetts 419). Bennetts then goes on to explain the resentment women begin to feel for having to give up their careers to be a homemaker. They begin to harbor anger towards their husbands who “still view child care and household chores as women’s work” (Bennetts 419).
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Evoked Female Identity During the 1960s in America, where phallocentrism is still ruling society, many social problems caused younger people to be unsatisfied with reality and to become rebellious. In Oates’s story, the character of Connie is affected by patriarchal oppression. Oates gives Connie an independent identity while using her mother and sister as opposite characters to reflect her uniqueness and to let the reader understand the female identity. Connie's mother and sister portray typical females under patriarchal oppression. In the case of Connie’s mother, she rejected Connie’s attitudes because it often went against the patriarchal society's code of conduct.
Women have always been thought of as the less domineering sex. All through history females have fought the stereotypes of being simple housewives with no greater use then producing babies and maintaining a household. This repression, combined with the social systems of years past has lead woman to feel inferior and naturally acquire an internal dependency toward the males in their lives who are viewed as superior. Many notable characters in literature have carried out the role of this inferior spouse and are no doubt created from the hostility of oppression women have felt for hundreds of years. We see two of these characters in Delia from Zora Neale Hurston’s story “Sweat” and John’s wife in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
‘Women must creep’ (Elaine R. Hedges) illustrates the thought that women shouldn’t be heard, but do only what they’re required to do, reinforcing how women were demeaned. The lack of power women had was not only present within their marriage, but also in society as males were perceived as the more significant gender, so women were patronised and dismissed by patriarchal control. Patriarchal control is represented clearly by John, the protagonist’s husband, which increases complexity within the novel as the isolation and ‘The resting cure’ he enforces upon her, causes her mental state to degenerate further, despite John believing it is helping his wife. There are a number of methods used to increase the characters complexity in The Yellow Wallpaper. For example, the use of epistolary displays a 1st person narrative and is in the present tense, “I never used to be so sensitive.” This is present when the protagonist writes to herself, Gilman uses this technique in order to show the
All that chaos contributed to the male chauvinism we see in our current society. Women had to handle that change without any moral support. It is also important to remember the important role women took in both world wars. A “Jury of Her Peers”, demonstrates how hard marriage was for all women who did not enjoy their relationships. Women in those types of relationships were treated as objects instead of being valued as women of freedom which represent intelligence, compassion, love and beauty.
She believes that feminists and feminism attacks marriage and women who believe in marriage and simply being a good mother and wife. An example O’Beirne uses to express these attacks is an excerpt from a book call “The Future of Marriage” by Jessie Bernard. In the excerpt Bernard says that marriage simply holds women back: “Being a housewife makes women sick.” “To be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, women must be slightly mentally ill.” O’Beirne says that the feminist movement did nothing but confuse gender roles and weaken the family structure that was established. I personally am not quite sure which side to take so I’m sitting on the fence. I believe that feminists and their movement did do a great deal of good for our society as a whole.
In this novel, Julia Alvarez manages to capture and express the true feelings of women which deconstructs the stereotypes through Yo. Feminism is defined as “a political movement that works to achieve equal rights for women and men” (Hirsch 113). For the past ages, women were seen in the society as inferior to men and were greatly excluded from education and the right to property ownership. A British feminist named Mary Wollstonecraft argues, “educational restrictions keep women in a state of ignorance and slavish dependence” (Blake 117). The shattering of classifications and stereotypes, and the subversion of traditional gender roles, and the concept of sisterhood or unity among women are among the main tenets of feminist criticism.
The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” details the struggle that women continue to face through male dominance and domestic violence by way of psychological abuse. Her story is centered on the detail of a woman’s captivity by her husband in order to improve her mental well being. The woman’s thoughts, emotions and imagination all play a vital role in discovering what is causing her state of mental incompetence. Occurring in the late 1800’s, the women’s suffrage movement had not yet occurred. Women were still viewed as being inferior to men and did not have a voice to air their concerns or displeasure.
The nurses felt the same anger as the other women prisoners at their own lack of power and the same repugnance to be sex servants, and as women in the military they had additional worries. They were conscious of their duty not to assist the enemy, and by appearing to cooperate with the Japanese could have faced degrading enquiries and court charges in the after the war; they knew the Japanese as the soldiers who had inflicted terrible injuries on the Australians they had nursed in the crowded temporary hospitals of Malaya and Singapore and as the murderers of 21 of their fellow nurses on the beach; and they feared that even if they survived the experience and were not formally charged with any offence their personal and professional lives after the war would be destroyed. If things came to the worst, they wondered if an individual nurse could attach herself to a particular Japanese in the hope that he might protect her from the others, and if they could ensure silence among themselves as a group. When the Japanese told Sister Win Davis what she had to do or be killed, she said that she chose death. At the time it was not an unlikely alternative.
Furthermore, women gained support for the feminist movement through the social media. Betty Freidman’s, The Feminine Mystique, described the melancholy lives and dissatisfaction that women led because of the restrictions put on them by the male-dominated community. Friedman says, “A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.” (Friedman 56). This means that women gave up the fight before they even gave it a chance and men took advantage of that. This acclaimed book ignited a dormant fire inside the oppressed women and feminism swept the nation during the 1960s.