Donald Hall's 'An Essay On Feminism'

Great Essays
Feminist Essay
“One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man” as said by Marlo Thomas. Feminism has been very well advocated since 1848. Before this, women had no rights and were seen as the weaker sex. Feminism was a range of movements and beliefs that fhad one goal in common to establish and achieve equal, political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. The idea that women were just essentially assets to men or “property” seen as they were the feeble sex who were to live by the standard of being the trophy wife was only just a peek of the inequality happening
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This caused a change in everyday life for women because they never felt free they felt trapped in the life they had to live believing they were happy and some women even got illnesses for that reason alone. The doctors (who were men as well) only assumed it was because women were predisposed to illness. The possibility of women being dissatisfied was not sought out because they had nothing to do except live by the norms that society had confined them to. This is all tied up to Donald Hall’s book entitled Literary and cultural theory, which Hall identifies, was aimed to understand the nature of gender inequality. Describes women’s social roles, and experiences it also explored the discrimination, objectification, oppression, and stereotyping done at the time. Authors who wrote stories about the everyday lives of a woman in the society where men were dominant and the women were seen as weak possessions were Charlotte Perkins who wrote The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin who wrote The Awakening and The story of an hour. This has all led up to the …show more content…
The author in this story expresses how trapped a woman in this society feels and how she has no way of expressing herself because she is held at a standard where is she is to love without really loving and live without really living in a so called ‘mans world” for example, the narrator here states “when she abandoned herself a little whisper word escaped her slightly parted lips she said it over and over under her breath: free, free, free!” (Chopin 130) here the author is revealing how the woman finally feels free how she had felt trapped under her husbands control in a society where he was dominant therefore he possessed the power but now that he was gone in some odd weary way she felt at peace she felt free like she was locked somewhere all these years but now she was finally free to live. Moreover, as free as the woman felt she would never really escape her reality which was still a woman living in an oppressed society pressured to be something they were not or couldn’t be to please a man. In addition to that the author provides the sad truth that a woman is so unhappy with her life living in an oppressed society that it can lead to death, example, “He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But Richard was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease of

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