Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
the role of women through history
gender roles throughout history essay
gender roles throughout history essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: the role of women through history
The Feminist Awakening
Women’s rights have evolved over time; beginning with being homemakers and evolving to obtaining professions, acquiring an education, and gaining the right to vote. The movement that created all these revolutionary changes was called the feminist movement. The feminist movement occurred in the twentieth century. Many people are not aware of the purpose of the feminist movement. The movement was political and social and it sought to set up equality for women. Women’s groups in the United States worked together to win women’s suffrage and later to create and support the Equal Rights Amendment. The economic boom between 1917 and the early 1960s brought many American women into the workplace. As women began to join the workplace they became progressively more aware of their unequal economic and social status. Homemakers, many of whom who had previously obtained college educations, began to voice their lack of personal fulfillment. They had an awakening, they realized their lives were not fulfilled and wanted more than what the restraints of society would offer them. Many literary works were born from the feminist movement; each enabling women to achieve more than what society expected of them and to push the societal limits. The Awakening is a prototype of the feminist movement.
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening follows a common theme in literature. She uses the novel as a way to demonstrate the emancipation of women. Peggy Skaggs believes that Chopin’s life experiences have affected her writing: “Her life and experiences as a woman apparently affirmed the truths she expressed first in “Emancipation”, and her development as a literary artist enabled her to transpose those truths into art with ...
... middle of paper ...
... had and the ability to live on their own. Edna is used to model a woman who would have been involved in the feminist movement.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Kate Chopin. New York. Chelsea House, 1987.
Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Notes. Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Chelsea House, 1999.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994.
Mercedes A., Yahoo Contributor Network. May 13, 2009
Found at: http://voices.yahoo.com/a-feminist-analysis-edna-pontellier-kate-chopins-3187443.html?cat=38
Musere, Jonathan. Yahoo Contributor Network. Jul 28, 2009
Found at: http://voices.yahoo.com/the-awakening-kate-chopin-review-3886054.html?cat=38
Phenix, Cecilia. Yahoo Contributor Network. May 13, 2007
Found at: http://voices.yahoo.com/feminism-kate-chopins-awakening-337709.html?cat=52
Skaggs, Peggy. "The Awakening".Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.
Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” is wrought with symbolism, foreshadowing and careful diction choices. Many of the passages throughout the novel embody Edna’s awakening sense of self-reliance, independence and sexuality. These are sy...
Throughout history there have been strict guidelines placed on women. Women are supposed to remain in their domestic sphere, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their children.
Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was a game changer in both the Civil War and modern war efforts. Not only did Barton introduce new ways of bringing care to wounded soldiers, she also transformed the ways people viewed women working on the battlefield. Clara Barton was the first woman to stand up for the better of both soldiers on the battlefield and women in the working force. Similar to Clara Barton, Kate Chopin’s protagonist Edna Pontellier, in her novel, The Awakening, serves as a turning point in the Victorian Era for women through her feminist ideals and rebellions against the norms of society. For example, Edna pursues herself as an individual rather than conforming to the expectations of the world around her. Edna also pushes the envelope by exploring her sexuality, a scandalous action for a married woman in the
...edicating herself to any of the available social roles leads her to abandon all of them in favor of an enticing yet ever elusive freedom” (Ramos 147). Arguably, Kate Chopin used realist writing such as The Awakening to break through the barriers built up by society’s image of male superiority and female acquiescence and push American literature deeper into an era of modernity.
An individual’s struggle may bring a single end result, however speculation on the cause of the struggle is very ambiguous. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, a woman serves as a paradigm of self-discovery at any time of one’s life. Throughout a collection of criticisms by Wolff, Yaeger, Franklin, and Treu it’s evident that Chopin was attempting to illustrate a modern woman’s struggle for individuality in midst of suppression from patriarchy and her internal strife, and the fault in allowing dreams to fabricate an unattainable reality.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin contradicts the popular nineteenth century image of the ideal southern woman as the main character, Edna Pontellier, gradually realizes her dissatisfaction with her life and discovers she was meant to live for something more. This kind of thinking was unheard of during this time period, and the novel soon raised significant controversy and was “banned from the [libraries’] shelves in response to negative and damning reviews” (Dyer 19). The novel redefines femininity by showing that women do not have to be limited by domesticity or submission.
The most prevalent and obvious gender issue present in the novella was that Edna challenged cultural norms and broke societal expectations in an attempt to define herself. Editors agree, “Edna Pontellier flouts social convention on almost every page…Edna consistently disregards her ‘duties’ to her husband, her children, and her ‘station’ in life” (Culley 120). Due to this, she did not uphold what was expected of her because she was trying to be superior, and women were expected to be subordinate to men. During that time, the women were viewed as possessions that men controlled. It was the woman’s job to clean the house, cook the meals, and take care of the children, yet Edna did none of these things. Her lifestyle was much different. She refused to listen to her husband as time progressed and continually pushed the boundaries of her role. For example, during that time period “the wife was bound to live with her husban...
Bryfonski, Dedria, ed. Women's Issues in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven, 2012. Print.
When Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was published at the end of the 19th Century, many reviewers took issue with what they perceived to be the author's defiance of Victorian proprieties, but it is this very defiance with which has been responsible for the revival in the interest of the novel today. This factor is borne out by Chopin's own words throughout her Preface -- where she indicates that women were not recipients of equal treatment. (Chopin, Preface ) Edna takes her own life at the book's end, not because of remorse over having committed adultery but because she can no longer struggle against the social conventions which deny her fulfillment as a person and as a woman. Like Kate Chopin herself, Edna is an artist and a woman of sensitivity who believes that her identity as a woman involves more than being a wife and mother. It is this very type of independent thinking which was viewed as heretical in a society which sought to deny women any meaningful participation.
Kenneth Eble states, “…She undertook to give the unsparing truth about women’s submerged life” (2). Speaking solely about Kate Chopin, this quote puts emphasis upon Chopin’s disputes with her society. She used her writing as a technique to indirectly explicate her life by the means of narrating her stories through the characters she created. Kate Chopin was one of the modern writers of her time, one who wrote novels concentrating on the common social matters related to women. Her time period consisted of other female authors that focused on the same central theme during the era: exposing the unfairness of the patriarchal society, and women’s search for selfhood, and their search for identity. In Chopin’s novel The Awakening, she incorporates the themes mentioned above to illustrate the veracity of life as she understood it. A literary work approached by the feminist critique seeks to raise awareness of the importance and higher qualities of women. Women in literature may uncover their strengths or find their independence, raising their own self recognition. Several critics deem Chopin as one of the leading feminists of her age because she was willing to publish stories that dealt with women becoming self-governing, who stood up for themselves and novels that explored the difficulties that they faced during the time. Chopin scrutinized sole problems and was not frightened to suggest that women desired something that they were not normally permitted to have: independence. Chopin’s decision to focus on and emphasize the imbalances between the sexes is heavily influenced by her upbringing, her feelings towards society, and the era she subsisted in.
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening takes place in the late 19th century, in Grande Isle off the coast of Louisiana. The author writes about the main character, Edna Pontellier, to express her empowering quality of life. Edna is a working housewife,and yearns for social freedom. On a quest of self discovery, Edna meets Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, falls in and out of love,and eventually ends up taking her own life. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening shows how the main character Edna Pontellier has been trapped for so many years and has no freedom, yet Edna finally “awakens” after so long to her own power and her ability to be free.
In Kate Chopin's short story “The Awakening”, the voice of the story portrays a woman with sexual aspirations, and moral female social rules in search for independence and self discovery. The story is based on the 19th century woman. During this time women barely had any freedom, were not recognized within the society and had no choice but to me submissive to their husbands. The main character of the story named Edna is portrayed to be a happy woman because she has everything; a wealthy, attentive husband, and two children. Thoughtout the story the truth about Edna’s unhappiness is revealed. The voice of the story uses symbolism, irony, and figurative language to express Edna Pontellier’s feelings as she found her way to her happiness and freedom.
Did you know that 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them? That the life they’ve experienced, sprouted, and learned countless lessons from gives them the initiative to write. That's exactly what Kate Chopin had in mind when she wrote the book, “The Awakening.” In, “The Awakening” Chopin writes about the culture she lived in, the situations she went through, and the feelings she felt in the society.
Kate Chopin boldly uncovered an attitude of feminism to an unknowing society in her novel The Awakening. Her excellent work of fiction was not acknowledged at the time she wrote it because feminism had not yet come to be widespread. Chopin rebelled against societal norms (just like Edna) of her time era and composed the novel, The Awakening, using attitudes of characters in favor to gender, variations in the main character, descriptions and Edna's suicide to show her feminist situation. Society during Chopin's time era alleged women to be a feeble, dependent gender whose place laid nothing above mothering and housekeeping. In The Awakening, Chopin conveys the simple attitudes of society toward women mainly through her characters Leonce, Edna, Madame Ratignolle, and Madame Reisz. She uses Leonce and Madame Ratignolle to depict examples of what was considered adequate in society. In a critical essay written by Emily Toth, she states that "The Awakening is a story of what happens when a woman does not accept her place in the home. The novel moves us because it illustrates the need for women's psychological, physical, social, and sexual emancipation--the goals of feminists in the twentieth century as well as the nineteenth" (Toth). However, Chopin takes account of the opposing characters of Edna and Madame Reisz in a determination to express desires and wants concealed by the female gender.
A Feminist Perspective on Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour. Kate Chopin employs the tool of irony in "The Story of an Hour" to carefully convey the problem inherent in women's unequal role in marital relationships. Chopin develops a careful plot in order to demonstrate this idea, one not socially acceptable at the end of the 19th century, and unfortunately, a concept that still does not appreciate widespread acceptance today, 100 years later as we near the end of the 20th century. Louise Mallard's death, foreshadowed in the initial line "Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble" takes on quite a different meaning when the plot twists and the context of her sudden death is presented unexpectedly, not upon her shock at her husband's death, but instead in her inability to endure the fact that he lives.