Motherhood and marriage is seen to be a key factor in the society of which The Bell Jar is set ,and is portrayed as one of the things that supresses female identity when Esther is asked to be “Mrs Buddy Willard” as if she is owned by Buddy and not her own person. Even though Top Girls is set in 1980’s England while Margret Thatcher is Prime Minister, it shows direct correlations to the ideas shown in The Bell Jar. Just as the bell jar itself portrays motherhood and marriage to be a hindrance to Careers In the form of Dodo Conway, Top Girls protagonist Marlene symbolises the other option women have in the choice between a career and a family. Marlene, unlike her sister Joyce, is shown to have given up her child for the chance to pursue a career as if having both is impossible; a lot like Jaycee is in The Bell Jar. This essay will argue that In both texts motherhood and marriage is shown to be a hindrance to both women’s careers and their female identity.
Analytical Essay Have you ever wanted to change something about yourself that no one else thought needed to be changed? What if everyone else but you thought you needed to change a flaw you had never seen before. That is the tragic situation in Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll.” The main character went from having a positive outlook on her beauty and being healthy and intelligent to having a negative self image and becoming self-conscious of everything that once was. If she had been told she was beautiful, maybe just once, she would not have taken such drastic measures to obtain beauty. In Piercy’s poem, the deadly effects of the ‘Beauty Myth’ are revealed in a symbolic representation of death.
Marszalek writes this book in order to retell a well-known story under a different light. Instead of telling the story of the Petticoat Affair based on Jackson and his struggles at the time, he focuses on Margaret Eaton as the main person and her struggles throughout the whole scandal. Marszalek tries to prove how this affair was less of a political crisis, but more of a social struggle and a woman standing up against the defined roles of society. Marszalek’s viewpoint is that of sympathy towards Eaton, saying that she stood up for herself during a time where her decisions were not approved by society. According to Marszalek, the Petticoat Affair was “the most famous debate over the meaning of womanhood in American history” (p. 21).
The obsession of the color pink, the non-athletic abilities, and the simple things like how women walk or hold their books. In Chapter 9 of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee also approaches the stereotypical expectations of females. "I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants. "(Lee 81). Aunt Alexandra was horrified with the fact that Scout did not live up to the standards society had of women.
Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House ends on either a very negative note, or a very positive note depending upon how one views such situations. At the end of the story, Nora Helmer leaves her oppressive, belittling husband, and children - who are hardly her children - behind to rediscover and educate herself. Ibsen states, “The wife in the play ends by having no idea of what is right or wrong; natural feeling on one hand and belief in authority on the other have altogether bewildered her.” (Ibsen. 409) Nora’s situation was a very unique one with many tunnels and slides to be trekked. Her exit was a fully rational, completely acceptable action.
The leadership at Mattel was either arrogant because of the success of Barbie or the were not paying attention to current times; “Changing cultural views about the role of girls, women, sex, marriage, and women working in the last decades shifted the tastes of doll buyers.” (Jones, 2013) Just as the case study mentioned I too think that they were stuck in the mindset of “if its not broke don’t fix it.” This crippled the sales of the doll and when they saw the out come it was too late to fix the problem. They failed at every attempted and Bratz continued to take over the doll market. Mattel was at the top of the mountain when it came to selling dolls for nearly 50 years so there was hesitation to change what had worked for so long. Mattel figured that if they altered the way she looked, dressed, and accessories that parents and kids would not continue to purchase the doll. This backfired on the company and they franticly did everything they could to match what Bratz was selling to their old customers.
No longer a self-assured sexual being, her response—that she is buying something for her mother,reveals that she has not yet quite reached adulthood. The combination of her brazenness and vulnerability ultimately spurs Sammy to shun the rules that bind him. ‘’You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar? ).’’ Sammy speculates on the mental processes of girls early in the story. he assumes that if he cannot understand the workings of a girl’s mind, it is because there is no mind there to understand.
More and more we have been hearing the wishful voices of just such perpetual adolescents, the voices of women scarred by resentment not of their class position as women but at the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions. "Nobody ever so much as mentioned" to Susan Edmiston "that when you say 'I do,' what you are doing is not, as you thought, vowing your eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of right, obligations and responsibilities that may well be anathema to your most cherished beliefs." To Ellen Peck "the birth of children too often means the dissolution of romance, the loss of freedom, the abandonment of ideals to economics." A young woman described on the cover of a recent issue of New York magazine as "the Suburban Housewife Who Bought the Promises of Women's Lib and Came to the City to Live Them" tells us what promises she bought: "The chance to respond to the bright lights and civilization of the Big Apple, yes. The chance to compete, yes.
She wrote in “Thinking About Shakespeare’s Sister”, about the acceptable actions that were performed on women specifically to oppress them. Actions life domestic abuse, arranged marriages, and being the property of the males in their lives. This was hundreds of years ago, but somewhere along the way we gradually gained independence and respect. I see this not as a need for an end to feminism. Society claims that we have reached a point where sexism is not existence and feminist are just grasping onto thin air to keep their agenda alive.
Joe's reasoning for attempting to make Chris feel guilty boil down to the fact that it will ultimately sustain Kate's support for him. The period in which A Doll's House was written was a time of intense subordination for women. As a Marxist would say, women were 'reified' by society due to its ideological nature, restricted to mere commodities. Nora is indeed expected to conform to this principle by the characters of the play as well as audiences and critics of the time, but Ibsen has crafted the character in such a way that it is clear she is against the role