In the novel Susan Rowling lived at a time when women’s roles were primarily domestic. The late 1800s through early 1900s was a time were many Americans were marrying, and with marriage comes kids. In the 1800s, the average women birthed about six kids because there was no such thing as birth control at that time (Depaulo). Women at …show more content…
She lived in a time where women’s’ roles were to be the homemakers. She would have no real meaning and purpose other than to do everything around the house and raise her children. This causes Susan to feel a loss of independence and a need to search for her identity. Before she married her husband, she had a purpose and a clear understanding of her identity because she was a teacher; when she married, she had to give up her job up because he wanted to be a homemaker, and they decided that she would stay home with the kids. This goes back to how much inequality existed between the sexes at this time. Female and male roles were so distinct, the men were superior and had multiple freedoms, and the women just stayed home and took care of the house and the kids. Because Susan married between these gap of periods, Lessing states “This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence” (Lessing 413). This concludes that this marriage was destined to fail because of “failure in intelligence”. The “Intelligent” in this period of late 1950s early 1960s is the intelligence to adopt traditional roles of the female and male gender roles (Perkins). That is what was seen as the intelligent thing to do at this