Women Oppressed in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre: Women Oppressed

Gender is not a biological fact but a social construct. However, so many assumptions have been made in the attempt to define the terms gender and sex that society often defines gender as being solely male and female. The female sex has traditionally been oppressed due to inferences on physical and mental constraints that male-dominated society has imposed. As with culture, gender socialization begins with birth and the family structure, though many believe that specific events also have a great influence on the boundaries of gender. It has been suggested, for example, that schooling and education systems have a large responsibility in the formation of gender divisions. Gender differences have confronted society since the first peoples, and though progress has been made to level the playing field, men still receive more opportunities in education, the workforce, politics and other wide-scale arenas than do women. In the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Jane is an example of a woman oppressed, yet she finds ways to break free of that which confines her. The family structure and our school systems are two of the first places children learn about themselves. If they do not grant equal opportunity for men and women, it will be impossible to create a just and gender-equal society.

Susan Moller Okin argues that family life is the first factor that has an influence on the socialization of children. Her concerns about the subjugation of women center around the opinion that "gender-structured marriages make women vulnerable" (5), and that unjust families lead to an unjust society made up of members incapable of making decisions free of gender bias, "They (theorists of ...

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...ures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags" (111).

Both Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan Moller Okin would echo those statements, and undoubtedly place much of the blame on education systems and the family structure. Without equality in those two arenas, it will be impossible to create an equal and just society, just as Wollstonecraft scolded M. Talleyrand-Périgord and his fellow men "for not applying to women the same concern and commitment for 'human' rights and freedom that they hold for men" (534).

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York, Penguin Books, 1997.

Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender and the Family. United States of America: Basic Books, 1989.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Rights of Women. Everyman's Library Edition.