Marge Piercy uses “The Secretary Chant” to explain the thoughts and feelings of women in the workforce as they entered a new era with new rights. Piercy uses metaphors and imagery to entice readers to dig deeper into the meaning of her words. When quickly reading the poem, one would simply imagine a person made up of office supplies, but there is a more profound message to be heard. “My hips are a desk,” (Piercy 1) creates a foundation for the poem, while symbolizing the foundation of the speaker’s body. The secretary in “The Secretary Chant” describes each part of her body as a different office supply found at her workstation.
The first six lines of “The Secretary Chant” paint a mental picture of a woman, sitting at a desk, working as a
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secretary. Within the first line, the speaker immediately compares herself to an object. She loses her humanity very quickly by doing this, making it known that she has become one with her career. Focusing on more insignificant parts of her body, we are told that “rubber bands form my hair,” (Piercy 4) and “my breasts are wells of mimeograph ink,” (Piercy 5). These are two things that make a woman, a woman, and by saying this she implies that she has lost her womanhood as well as her humanity. When she describes her feet, she says that they “bear casters,” (Piercy 6) she is expressing her way of movement, only being able to roll around on the wheels in areas that the office can reach. When comparing her navel to a “reject button,” (Piercy 15) the speaker implies that her existence is not necessary, simply because she is a woman. From her foundation that keeps her standing to the material that holds her hair together, the speaker has become physically one with her career. As the secretary’s body becomes dehumanized, her mind is also taken over by the demands of her job.
As she becomes more entrenched in her work, her mind is filled with madness and perplexity. To express the confusion she is experiencing, she describes her mind as “a badly organized file,” (Piercy 8) and “a switchboard where lines crackle,” (Piercy 9-10). Being a secretary involves so many tasks, making it hard to have a clear mind. Like the secretary, the speaker in Philip Levine’s “What Work Is” understands the confusion that comes with a workload. When it begins to rain, the speaker says the rain is “falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision,” (Levine 9). This suggests that like the secretarial job, being a male in the workforce was demanding as well. The speaker from “The Secretary Chant” cannot control the dehumanization she is experiencing, like the speaker from “What Work Is” cannot control things becoming …show more content…
unclear. While obviously devoting her entire being to her work, we are shown how belittled the women in the environment are treated.
In an attempt to explain how to do a task, she says, “press my fingers,” (Piercy 11) as if her fingers are equipment used to process credit and debit. By saying, “from my mouth issue cancelled reams,” (Piercy 16) she tells us how her attempts to speak to her supervisor are ignored. The words that want to flow from her mouth seem worthless to her because this is how her boss sees her. Seeing that her words mean nothing, the speaker debates the existence of a more important right: the right to bear children. She states “I am about to be delivered of a baby Xerox machine,” (Piercy 17-20) and we are shown childbirth through the eyes of a machine, rather than a human. Not only is the role of a secretary transforming the speaker physically, but she is also being conformed mentally.
In Piercy’s poem “The Secretary Chant,” she uses symbolism heavily to express herself becoming another object, or objects. The speaker in the poem was once a happy woman, but she has lost sight of the image of what she used to be. As a reader continues to the next line, the metaphor that began as “my hips are a desk” grows until it consumes every part of the speaker. Piercy does not use similes in this poem to stress the importance of the speaker actually being another object. A person can easily lose sight of their identity while they have no recognition of it, and Piercy does a great
job of portraying this idea.
In “Scrubbing in Maine”by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich decides to work at the Maids Franchise so she can observe how the system was made for the maids. During her time being a maid she became emotionally impacted by the way her and the women were treated. Ehrenreich experiences in the article”Scrubbing in Maine,’’are the ones I can relate to even though both jobs don’t seem the same, the fact is my time spent working at Jewel is remarkably and depressingly similar to the time spent by Ehrenreich as a maid. In both instances employees are not really human, but are parts of a bigger machine and only Blue collar workers are stereotypes as uneducated unthinking individuals. As Blue collar jobs emphasized the routines, dehumanization of the employee, and loss of control over a person’s time. Workers do not engage in cognitive skills, but physical
This ESSAY discusses the female Lowell factory worker as portrayed in the Offering. Although the magazine never expressed an overtly feminist view of the factory girls' condition, nor invoked a working-class consciousness similar to later labor expressions in Lowell, there is evidence of a narrative strategy and ideology speaking both to the factory women and the middle-class readership outside of the mill town. The paper's short stories, epistolary narratives and commentaries seek to legitimize an operatives' role within the feminine ideal of domesticity. In conforming to the norms of feminine literature, the Offering reconstructs the operatives' character. It subordinates the evidence for independence or autonomy to relate stories of familial or sentimental ties binding the factory girl to the world outside of factory life. The magazine sought to provide an answer to this question: given her new liberties, what kept the "factory girl" from losing contact with her moral sentiments?
The poem describes workers to be “Killing the overtime ‘cause the dream is your life, / Refusing to take holidays or go home to your spouse, / But for many the overtime comes, ‘cause the work is not done. / Deadlines to be met. So you continue to dream like a war vet, / Having flashbacks to make you shiver and scream” (Jones, stanza 7, lines 2-6). Jones reinforces that overworking for an incentive of money does not give one a sense of gratification, and it also distracts them from the values that should matter more to them than anything else. Both Kohn and Jones have a similar approach to showing the reader the effect that overworking can have on a person, and how it will change their values in life, causing unhappiness. Many students go through school dispirited and do not join various clubs and activities for their own enjoyment. A friend of Kohn’s who was also a high school guidance counsellor had a student with ‘…amazing grade and board scores. It remained only to knock out a dazzling essay on his college applications that would clinch the sale. “Why don’t we start with some books that
He expresses about his mother working at the restaurant is what made him and this article credible. He got to witness and experience his mom and her “waiting brilliance” up close and personal (Rose, 273). He also states, “I’ve since studied the working habits of blue-collar workers and have come to understand how much my mother’s kind of work demands of both the body and the brain” (274). In this statement he establishes his own credibility as a source of authority on this issue. Rose, the author, wants to open social minds by showing “mental activity” (279) required in blue-collar work is still under-recognized and undervalued by society. The blue-collar workers are not as valued as they deserve but the capability they have is not less than other high-level workers, even sometimes it’s more than
Controlled by bells, a Lowell woman’s 11-hour work day began before dawn and ended after 6:30 in the evening. These bells were a constant reminder that their lives were centered on work, not their family. Developing a family and investing in the domestic culture is a key aspect of True Womanhood. By turning away from this family focus, women were straying from the True Womanhood ideals.
Connie Fife is a Saskatchewan, Cree poet who writes using her unique perspective, telling of her personal experiences and upbringing. This perspective is revealed to her audience through the poems “This is not a Metaphor”, “I Have Become so Many Mountains”, and “She Who Remembers” all of which present a direct relationship to her traditional background and culture (Rosen-Garten, Goldrick-Jones 1010). To show the relationship of her experiences through her poetry, Fife uses the form of dramatic monologue, as well as modern language and literal writing to display themes about racism presenting her traditional viewpoint to her audience.
She mentions how you should not put off a lot of time just because one’s children are young. Be a good role model for a daughter or even a son, let them know they can do it; they can be successful regardless of their gender. In this book, Sandberg describes non-fictional struggles for a woman in the workplace. She uses real life experiences to portray the image and information she wants to be known. Women have been fighting for decades to get equal treatment in the workplace and they still aren’t equal, they still struggle although it is not as much as
...ues women’s work becomes wrong. Yes, in today’s society one could argue further that a woman who stays at home and does not work is only reinforcing the stereotype and prolonging the inequality. However, this essay was not written to change the world. It simply strove to identify and prove the reasons behind a ruined sense of self worth that many women in the early 1900’s felt as a result of their work being demeaned. By reaching out to people’s emotional sides, McBride relayed her grandmother’s tale so that people could clearly feel the hurt and demotion that women of that time lived with in order to have them persuaded that the oppression of women in any manner and capacity is wrong.
...al questions, an extended metaphor, and allusion, she persuades her audience to try and break down their insecurities in order to create a rich lifestyle for them. However, gender stereotypes have been and always will be prevalent in society. As she states in the essay, “Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.” It has been shown that she was correct, seeing as women are still discriminated against in a number of professions. If a woman states, for example, that she wishes to be a mechanic, or possibly even an electrician, many men and other women will likely snort at the idea and think of it as a ridiculous joke. Even though society has come a long way over the years, it will still be an even longer amount of time before women can finally feel equal.
The 19th century was a time when middle to upper-middle class women became ornamental. Their lives revolved around image, their husbands, and as much idleness as their husbands wealth could afford them(iii). There were servants to tend to the home and servants to tend to children. An afternoon tea and shopping expedition was an acceptable, even proper, way to spend ones day as a lady. The husband in The Yellow Wallpaper cannot see why his wife should be stressed or nervous. He tells her that she is allowing her mind to get carried away and that that is her sole problem. Her illness reflects directly on him as both her husband and her doctor adding to her overwhelming sense of anguish.
During the 19th century, in eastern America, men were the heads of families and controllers of the work place, while women had little power, especially over their roles; particularly upper class women due to the lack of necessity for them to work outside the home. “Men perpetrated an ideological prison that subjected and silenced women”(Welter, Barbara). Their only responsibilities were to be modest, proper women who took care of themselves and did not stray from the purpose of motherhood. They were to remain in the home scene and leave the public work to the men; trapped in their own households, they were expected to smile, accept, and relish such a life. Barbra Walter also agrees that women were imprisoned in their homes, and were merely good for maintaining the family, “a servant tending to the needs of the family”(Welter). Many women's emotions, as well as minds, ran amiss from this life assignment and caused them to stray from the social norms set up by tradition. The narrator in Charlotte Gilman's story, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a victim of such emotional disobedience and rebelliousness. As well as the rebellious women in the poem The Woman in the Ordinary, by Marge Piercy.
The time of a girls life where physical changes begin to happen, a time in which a child grows up to be a women. The comment “You have a great big nose and fat legs.” brings forth a sense of sadness and insecurities for the girlchild. It shows the realism of the expectation that is placed on society's norm causes the world to conform to its standards of what it beautiful and what is not. What lies with in this comment is the main issue that is addressed in Marge Piercy's poem. The critical judgment of those around are brought on by today’s social
The poem, “What Work Is” by Philip Levine is an intricate and thought-provoking selection. Levine uses a slightly confusing method of describing what work actually is. He gives the idea that work is very tedious, however necessary. It is miserable, however, it is a sacrifice that is essentially made by many, if not all able-bodied members of society. Many have to sacrifice going to a concert or a movie, but instead works jobs with hardly a manageable salary. This poem seems to have a focus on members of the lower-class or middle-class who live paycheck to paycheck and are unable to put money away for a future for their children or for a vacation and how difficult life can be made to be while living under this type of circumstance. Levine
...being wrongly prejudiced against, and this cannot remain the state of society. Without women in the workplace, society goes backward. There is a warning in Gertrude Stein’s words: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” More to the point, if a woman does not want to work with a man, mankind ends.
... take a backseat and hide our intellect behind the soft exterior of emotion. As said in Virginia Woolf’s essay, professions of women, we will always have hardship because we have to work harder than the male race.