What Is Jane Addams View Of Women's Equality

In a society where women were treated second to men, women were clearly outraged. In the early twentieth century, men played the dominant role in society: they worked, they formulated the government, and they also obtained the right to vote and own property. Contrastingly, women had the isolated role in society during that time. They expectantly stayed at home, where they cleaned, cooked, and took care of the children. The women of this time were tired of being treated inferior to men, which laid the foundation for women’s rights and the feminism movement. Alice Paul was a feminist, and she was an instrumental figure in creating equality to men in terms of voting. Since then, feminism expanded to include more than just equality in voting. Feminism,

In referencing William Shakespeare’s play King Lear, she uses King Lear’s two older daughters as a depiction of what men believe will happen if women are given equality. In the play, King Lear is going to split up his kingdom amongst his daughters and he asks them each how much they love him. The two older daughters tell him they love him so much, but his younger daughter responds saying that her bond of love is only as strong as his bond of love for her. Once the two older daughter received their portion of the kingdom, they became power hungry and irrational with all the power that they accepted. Jane Addams shows how this power overwhelmed the daughter’s when she says, “When the kingdom was given to them they received it as altogether their own, and were dominated by a sense of possession; “it is ours not yours” was never absent from their consciousness” (Lear 174). Jane further describes that once the daughters received the power of this kingdom, they became greedy with it, and they were reluctant to surrender it. They constantly wanted to forget that their father, at one time, ruled the kingdom, and in fact, they wanted to believe they always ruled it. Addams continues to discuss how cruelly these older daughters were ruling their kingdom when she states, “Finally, his mere presence alone reminded them too much of that and they banished him from the palace” (Lear 174). The daughters became angrier

As previously mentioned, the story of King Lear discusses how he split up his kingdom among his three daughters. He asked a simple question how much do you love me and what his two older daughters said does not matter in this context, but what his younger daughter said is very important. She said my love for you is only as strong as your bond of love is for me. King Lear does not take this very well and he banishes Cordelia, his youngest daughter, from the family. Ultimately, his kingdom gets split among his two older daughters, and his youngest daughter gets nothing. As mentioned above, the two older daughter become abusive of the power when they receive it, but Cordelia could not be more different than her older sisters. Cordelia represents what society wants to see stem from women’s equality. Society does not want cut throat action between males and females, but rather, mutual understandings and equal treatment. James Livingston examines what Addams is trying to depict with Cordelia when he says, “So we can say that, for Addams, the figure of Cordelia represented the promise of a social ethic through which both the modern woman and the modern labor movement could voice their objections to an archaic individualism and articulate a new moral universe predicted on solidarity” (Livingston 69). So, what Livingston is trying to say, is that