How Is Women Inequality In The Late 1800s

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Female inequality during the late 1800s
Throughout the late 1800s Americans were workaholics, constantly working in order to make a living for their families at home. Women stayed home and took care of the house as well as the children. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes place in the late 1800s.The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is no stranger to the hysteria that took over women in the 19th century. According to Mary Ellen Snodgrass, after her own postpartum emotional collapse and treatment in 1887, Gilman knew about the situation women were experiencing (“Gilman”). All the pressure of working and raising children affected all Americans, but society blamed the nervous depression mainly on women because they were women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman conveys her own life experience and illness that she went through and how women were treated during the 1800’s.
In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman includes a variation of elements for the reader to try to comprehend the story. However, sickness and gender are associated together. Gilman is a woman from the 19th century that suffered from postpartum depression. Also, back in the 1800s society viewed women as the weaker sex. Carmine Esposito states that: the behaviors women experienced in the 1800s would not be viewed as an illness in men (“Illness”). Therefore, women were more prone to diseases such as the infamous nervous depression. As a part of the cure physicians prescribed that patients stay completely isolated from events that would actively stimulate the brain. According to Esposito, requirements for the “rest cure” stated that patients should avoid physical activity and be completely isolated from the tendency to overthink (“Illness”). Likewise, in “The ...

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...inforced the votes-for-women effort (“Suffrage”).

The last point to make is the fact that at the end of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the gender roles reverse. Women have the power, and men are the weaker sex. Esposito states, “This questioning leads to the reversals in gender roles that signal shift in power at the end of the story” (“Gender”). In the short story, the narrator asks why her husband John passed out? (Gilman 319) Esposito uses the term melodrama to explain her reasoning for gender role reversal. In the last sentence of Esposito’s article on gender, she clarifies power being reversed. According to Esposito, “The narrator is no longer ‘under’ her husband, but ‘over’ him” (“Gender”). The last sentence is powerful because it shows how even though the narrator became insane, she finally overcame society’s beliefs that men are the stronger sex.

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