Feminism in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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After a long struggle to have some rights, women were not given the right to vote until 1920. For many centuries women have been controlled by men by being told what they can and cannot do. The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is considered a feminist piece through the narrators husband’s words and actions, the environment she stayed in, and the narrator’s own words.
The narrator’s words play a strong role in displaying her being the inferior gender in society. Judith A. Allen states that, “Gilman's early brush with madness, fictionalized in her famous short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," resulted not from a doctor's prescription of the rest cure as the story might suggest, but from the excruciating miseries--sexual, economic and otherwise--of her first marriage” (Allen). One way the narrator shows that her husband was of higher rank is by saying, “There comes John, and I must put this away… he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 801). Writing in a journal shows her desire to express her thoughts, but if she does she will be punished by her husband. The n...

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