The Changing Roles Of Women In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

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An average American family in today’s society usually consists of a mother, a father, and a child, or children, whom the father, or mother, or both, work to provide for their family or take care of their children and household. It wasn’t always this case. Modern American families and modern society are the result of the significantly changed roles of women that has happened over the past century. For many years, women were given the role as “housewives” and were expected to stay at home, care for their children, keep the house nice and clean, and to comfort the husband in any way when he was home. The husband was the household provider; the only one that worked for pay. The picture isn’t as blissful as it may seem; there were many limitations
According to The Norton Anthropology of American Literature, " Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived her life, for the most part, on the margins of a society whose economic assumptions about and social definitions of women she vigorously repudiated" (Gilman 790). "The Yellow Wallpaper" has to some extent an amount of relation to Gilman 's life with embellishments related to the issue of men supremacy over woman and women trying to live up to their social expectation with their wife- mother role. Although there is a slight relation between Gilman and the main character, we cannot assume the unnamed character is Gilman herself. Critic Ann J. Lane commented that Gilman offered "vivid dramatization of the social ills that result from a competitive economic system in which women are subordinate to men and accept their subornation" (Gilman 791). Gilman was successful in implying her beliefs on this issue through the anonymous character from her short story "The Yellow

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