Women

she places her finger inside her mouth again. The words “fat” and “ugly” fill her head as forced tears squeeze out her eyes. She just wants to be beautiful – beautiful like the girl in the magazine. Depicting women with tight, thin waists and thin arms and legs were not popular now, but popular throughout history. This “standard of female beauty” can start during the 19th century, a century where women had tiny waists and large “bustles” (Derenne). Later, the invention of the corset began to become the trend of the 20th century. However, instead of dresses, they…

Sexual Objectification of Women If a woman today is asked if she has ever felt uncomfortable due to an unwanted compliment from a man, she will probably say yes. If a woman is asked if she would rather have the body of Kate Upton than her own, she will probably say yes. If a woman is asked if she has ever tried to lose weight or considered reconstructive surgery to get closer to an ideal body, she will probably say yes. These are all examples of sexual objectification and potential…

statement that the female characters in To Kill a Mockingbird emulate through their actions (Ephron). This statement, written by a woman, urges other women to not stand by when difficult situations arise, but to have the strength to overcome those situations. This strength is hard to find, especially in a male-dominated world such as the setting in To Kill a Mockingbird. The setting takes place in the early 1930s. Common knowledge reveals that the further back one goes in history, the less and…

Female coming of age stories are especially intriguing, considering that society often has a set of ideals about what is of value to women and what young women should experience. The Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro, introduces the story of a girl named Del growing into a woman. Del is a young girl who is primarily raised by her mother. Del explores her sexuality, her religious beliefs, her sense of self-empowerment, and the function of gender in society. Housekeeping, written by…

Women in The Big Sleep As I have mentioned before, this was true in the case of the rise of feminism. Before the turn of the century, “Women arrived, en masse, [to the Western frontier], and the ‘male-dominated homosocial world of gold rush California’ gave way to a ‘settled domestic Victorian discipline’” (Hoefer 49). That ‘Victorian discipline’ gave way in the 1920s to a deviant social norm, exemplified by Carmen and to a lesser extent Vivian. Right before Marlowe expresses how much he…

Women have often been included in paintings and art even back to the Native Americans. Women within pieces of art typically portrayed the role of women during that time or culture. As the time in which a piece was created changed, the depicted role of women also adjusted. Additionally, the role of women varied between different cultures. However, the general ideas represented by the female form in artwork were motherhood, beauty, and the obligation to care for the home. One of the ways in…

Young women are prime victims to media due to their lack of experience and because their minds are still growing, young women are persuaded much easier. However what is the influence the media is having on these young girls? media displays the perfect women in their heads, influencing their preference on body type as well as providing them with poor choices for role models. Through time the media has changed the standard for what the “perfect” woman looks like. Todays choice for beauty is to be…

In the film Real Women Have Curves, which is a coming of age story, the main conflict was between a daughter, Ana, and her mother, Carmen. The mother and daughter cannot get along because of their age and traditional differences. Ana’s mother was old fashioned and wanted her daughter to graduate highschool, lose weight, join the family in their dressmaking business, and find a husband. Ana did not want her life to be this way and wanted to go to college and be and educated women who finds true…

In Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, a woman fakes her death in order to leave her husband. She does this because she blames him for making her play a part for him in their marriage, and she wants him to pay. She feels as though, ever since she 's known him, she has been pretending to be the woman he wants instead of the person she is. While no such drastic measures are taken in “Crossroads: A Sad Vaudeville”, the woman does something very similar- she puts out a picture of herself that she has…

Marilyn Monroe struts into the room, her classic white dress swaying in the breeze, her fill-the-room grin brightens the scene and you think to yourself, “gee, I wish I could be as famous as her.” Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Abigail Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Rosa Parks, Beyonce are a few names that come to mind when we think of “famous women in history.” In a high school assembly I learned that there are a few kinds of people in the world: those who make the news, those who report the news, and those…