In the oral history “Just a Housewife” Therese Carter tells her life experiences of being a housewife in Downer Grove Estates, West Chicago. What strikes me about this oral history is the importance that Therese places on knowing that she is just a housewife. She says that she has no special talents and is content with doing duties for her family because that is how she wishes to spend her life. The common pattern in this history is Therese’s acknowledgement that being a housewife is low on the totem pole, but she feels that the work she provides is necessary. Her feelings toward the work she provides is rewarding because she enjoy pleasing people and wishes to raise her kids right. Terkel gives voice to Therese by allowing her to not seem
Both Stephanie Coontz in “Great expectations” and Archena Bhalla in “My home, my world” address the issue about marriage and arranged marriages. While Stephanie mostly speaks on couples don’t make marriage their top priority and don’t last for a long time. And she gives an example by saying that “People nowadays don’t respect the marriage vowels.” She also believes that in the 18th and 19th centuries, conventional wisdom among middle-class men was the kind of woman you’d want for a wife was incapable of sexual passion which has changed in the 20th century. Also that marriage was viewed in the prospective that work relationship in which passion took second place to practicality and intimacy never was important with male. Bhalla speaks
The word ‘houseskeeping’ refers to both the lack of domestic feminine roles in the book, but also to what the girls’ grandmother, Sylvia Foster, stated about keeping her home within the family, both in a physical sense and, as Sylvie and Ruth depart from it, a spiritual one. Ruth’s grandmother is using the maintenance of the family home as a metaphor for the women of the Foster house to maintain the very essence of their family itself, “Sell the orchards, but keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof over your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be,” (Robinson 27). In saying that the orchards should be sold, but not the house, Sylvia is telling her granddaughters that everything outside of the family can be lost and replaced, but so long as they contain the family unit, they will remain safe. While this story does deconstruct the idea of an “all-American”, aesthetically pleasing family, it doesn’t shed the values that one would consider typical for American Literature, such as a heavy emphasis on religion and family. Instead, it allows a unique viewpoint of the different structures of an American family, and demonstrates how, while the structures may change, the overall goals of staying rooted in one’s beliefs and in one’s familial comfort zone often are the same no matter how the roles within a household are established and
... to the domesticated woman urging her to care for her family providing food for the body but to also care for herself in providing food for her mind: A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body” (602). Murray, also makes suggestion for reform, encouraging women not to abandon their familial roles, but, rather tend to their family’s domestic needs dynamically saying “while we are pursuing the needle, or the superintendency of the family, I repeat, that our minds are at full liberty for reflection; that imagination may exert itself in full vigor” (405). In saying this she encourages women not to be passive but to be active and dynamic in their supposed roles as women, to defy the notion of the archetypal woman who tends to her family and has nothing that pertains to her solely and enrich the mind and subsequently herself.
A house is not a home if no one lives there. During the nineteenth century, the same could be said about a woman concerning her role within both society and marriage. The ideology of the Cult of Domesticity, especially prevalent during the late 1800’s, emphasized the notion that a woman’s role falls within the domestic sphere and that females must act in submission to males. One of the expected jobs of a woman included bearing children, despite the fact that new mothers frequently experienced post-partum depression. If a woman were sterile, her purposefulness diminished. While the Cult of Domesticity intended to create obliging and competent wives, women frequently reported feeling trapped or imprisoned within the home and within societal expectations put forward by husbands, fathers, and brothers.
She puts herself in the mindset of many women in her position by getting a job as a waitress, getting a small apartment, and working minimum wage to get by day to day. Ehrenreich’s states, her main goal is “to lift poor women out of poverty as well as raise their self-esteem.” (p. 224.) This is a powerful statement Ehrenreich makes because she is not doing this for the sake of experimenting she honestly wants to make a difference in American women lives. The story shows Ehrenreich’s experience as working as minimum waitress in Hearthside as well as describing her coworkers and their
Before I watched 'A Midwife's Tale', a movie created from the diary found by Laurel Ulrich chronicling the life of a woman named Martha Ballard, I thought the women in these times were just housewives and nothing else. I pictured them doing the cleaning and the cooking for their husbands and not being very smart because of the lack of education or them being unable to work. My view on the subject changed however when I watched this specific woman's life and her work.
The domestic sphere was an area of great importance to literature of the 19th century—especially for women writers. As such, aspects of domesticity continued to appear throughout this period in a wide arrange of literature. In Ruth Hall, for instance, the mother struggles with her profession compromising her ability to maintain an atmosphere of domesticity. Similarly, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl covers a slave’s desire for a home and for safety, covering roughly the same sentiment from a wildly different perspective. While their circumstances are dissimilar, both Ruth from Ruth Hall and Linda from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl desire a return to the realms of domesticity that they left behind.
A women doing life is a book that talks openly about women in prison. The author of the book who is also an inmate is known as Erin George. She explains vividly about women life in prison and what she was going through as an inmate. The book also gives other stories about other female inmates. The book presents a realistic of what women goes through on daily basis in prison. The issues addressed are both physical and psychological challenges. She talks on behalf of those women facing challenges on daily basis in prison. The books explain life events that tragic and heartbreaking those changes later to be uplifting and humorous. She gives a story of how she is able to cope and manage in hard situations. The women’s humanity inside the prison is well shown in this book as they try to make ends meet in their daily life. This book is vivid and very compelling for women. It is one of the best contributions of the author in literature. The book has a virtually flawless pedagogical approach. The author’s writing is to a great extent excellent and it has helped in creating awareness in literature about the historical context of women in prison. It explains beyond the little information presented in the media about women life in prison and the challenges they face as inmates.
When analyzing the 1950s, it is clear that racial segregation, strict sexual mores, oppressive women’s rights, and high materialism were considered normal. Interracial marriage and divorces were an abomination in this time period and there was a major issue with racism in the 50s. Additionally, women were held to a different standard than men, they were to maintain the home and rear children, it was thought to be their only purpose. Furthermore, homosexuality was believed to be a sickness that could be cured, it was forbidden by society to be a homosexual. The 1960s counter-culture was all about rallying against these. This paper argues that despite the values of the 1950’s that the counterculture sought to reject, issues under the surface
The traditional image of women before the 1920s centered on their roles in the household. They cooked, cleaned, sewed, baked, and carried out many other domestic tasks. Even the media portrayed women’s roles through magazines such as “Good Housekeeping”, which by the very nature of the name is condescending. One editorial title was “Your Daughter and Her Job”, stating that women who didn’t do household tasks were not prepared for the f...
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique begins with an introduction describing the problem that has no name, which is the prevalent unhappiness of women. Friedan offers some case studies about unhappy women from around the United States, and Friedan wonders whether this unhappiness is connected to the female role of housewife. Friedan describes the differences between the past three generations of women. Grandmothers, Suffrage Feminists, and Mothers. Media representation and women 's magazines nurture the image of the uneducated wife and mother who is content taking care of her family in a house which is equipped with modern technological appliances. Sometimes the media would describe the role of the woman as rewarding. Women have their education, they have worked,
Although my mother did not work outside the home, she worked diligently, relentlessly, and efficiently in our home. I can recall her baking and selling cakes, babysitting for other mothers, and preparing balanced meals as we enjoyed the luxuries of an organized, clean, well-maintained ranch style home that my father had built. Her day started before her kids woke up in the morning and didn’t end until late in the evening, long after we were in
Adrienne Rich’s Snapshot of a Daughter-in-law and Don DeLillo’s End Zone use negative diction and imagery to describe their thoughts on feminism and postmodernism. Rich uses negative diction and imagery to describe a woman who has adapted to the world’s opinion of what a woman should be and what women should do in the home. DeLillo uses negative diction to describe Myna after she conforms to beauty of the day. Rich brings in ideas of how domestic chores create a burden on women physically and emotionally. DeLillo also uses Myna to describe what he thinks about the world’s view on beauty and notions for women. If women are told that they are only worth what they look like and what they do and not what they think, nothing will ever truly change.
Friedan frustratingly explains how women’s choices to revert back to domestic roles after World War II compromised women’s independence and identity. Friedan uses this frustration to revive modern feminism and extinguish the prison that gender roles had imprisoned women in. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan illustrates how women fell into the common portrayal of a housewife just fifteen years after the war and how “millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school…their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers…”(Friedan 61) and other description that fit the occupation of “housewife”.
Women during the years before the second wave were being coaxed back into the home. To quote Betty Friedan, “They were taught to pity the...