Gender Inequality In I Sing The Body Electric By Walt Whitman

Gender and equality have been a hot topic of debate in past decades. For thousands of years, society has believed that women’s status should be inferior to a man’s status and this belief has continued on into today’s modernized society. More specifically, women’s role in society has been to create a family at home, while the man of the household has many possible opportunities in the world outside of the home. In his poem, I Sing the Body Electric, Walt Whitman seemingly perpetuates the idea that a man has more value in his body than a woman. I Sing the Body Electric uses a division between man and woman by role to reinforce the idea of gender inequality and suggests that while our bodies, at their core, are equal, our roles in life are not. …show more content…
Many of the descriptions of this man include things he 's done with his life and the way that others think of him. His life is defined by his work and the things that he has done with his life. The farmer’s body is emphasized for its strengths and qualities on its own, not based on his body’s value to another person. Whitman also praises man for the way that his passions become him. In the traditional sense of the world, a man’s passion is his pride and this is what comes to define him. In this poem, man is “all qualities, he is action and power” (254). This description of man closely follows traditional gender roles of the man – the stronger being, the bread-bearer of the family, and other so-called manly traits typically attributed to male gender roles. In fact, the roles talked about in this poem goes farther back than modernized traditional gender roles. His hobbies are hunting and fishing, which were the basic duties of a man in ancient times which represent strength and superiority. While Whitman may have tried to emphasize that man and women were equal, man’s status definitely shows signs of being stronger, and more fleshed