Kate Chopin’s The Awakening - The Feminist Awakening

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 ...

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... 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.