Anne Bradstreet Feminist Analysis

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Anne Bradstreet: The First American Feminist
There are not several female writers in American Literature and until a certain point it was traditionally a man’s game. It is intriguing that in a Puritan society was when one of the first women writers came about. Anne Bradstreet may not have been published until after her death but it does not deny what she has done. With that being said it is perhaps inaccurate to describe Bradstreet’s work as “feminist,” for she never directly advocates upsetting or attempting to overturn the colonial gender hierarchy. However, in several of her poems, she accepts that men and women have different roles in society, because she believes that it is what God intended. It is believed that Bradstreet’s feminist views are held inside only to come out in her writing because of her Puritan views. This is seen by the conflict created in her writing between the Puritan society and her identity as a woman.
Anne Bradstreet focuses her poems on things dealing with the simple life part of that being the reality of her living in a male-dominate society. Bradstreet does not fight this however in a lot of her writing she questions it. In her poem, “The Prologue,” Bradstreet questions her role and how women are equal to men. She states, “Let Greeks be Greeks, and
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In stanza five of “The Prologue,” she states, “If what I do prove well, it won’t advance. They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.” Bradstreet gives a small hint of reality as she shows how unfair and corrupt the society is. How one person’s work if not a man’s can be hidden or claimed to be stolen from a man in order to be socially acceptable. This was done with one of her later poems. “The Author to Her Book” was originally published with the author being stated as anonymous. However later on, it was learned to be one of hers and credit was given in more recent

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