Gender Equality In Grace And Grace's Alias Grace

Issues with gender equality were prevalent during the 19th century in Canada, which eventually led to women’s movements towards suffrage and equality. The expectations for women were not very high. They were mostly left to deal with the housework, the children, and were responsible for tending to their husbands if married. Ever since they were young, girls were programmed to believe that women “struggled to make ends meet if they failed to marry or if their husbands deserted them” (I Do: Love and Marriage in 19th Century Canada). Due to the fact that women were barred from professional, well-paying jobs, the only chance for a woman to survive was to marry. Similarly, in Alias Grace, both Grace and Mary dream of getting married since that was …show more content…
Grace knows that she alone cannot change the gender dynamic in her society, but she can save herself from complete patriarchal domination by using her most powerful tool: the real story, which she can withhold and reveal at her will. After all, “her strongest prison is of her own construction” (Atwood 362). Therefore, Grace has the ability to free herself from this prison of social laws and stereotypes, and she does so through manipulation and psychological control. Even if Grace cannot gain control explicitly in the professional world, Grace finds a way to gradually gain power form Dr. Jordan in her “refusal to say anything, to turn down traditional forms of patriarchal communication. Instead she opts for a specifically female discourse: quilting” (Szalay 177). Dr. Jordan, uninterested and uneducated in the women’s art of quilting, does not draw the association between the story she tells and her act of quilting. In this sense, Grace uses Simon’s stereotypical masculine disinterest in women’s crafts to establish the connection among her, Nancy, and Mary, revealing more in her quilts than her …show more content…
Since mothers have the authority on how their children are raised, then women have control on what future generations will think about gender roles. People easily accept and abide by gender preconceptions because “children learn gender roles from an early age — from their parents and family, their religion, and their culture, as well as the outside world” (Cullins). Women may not be able to transform their environment in their lifetime, but their children can start the domino effect. Hence, females may view males as this overwhelming oppressive presence, but women feed into these constructs. After all, “gender is a social construction which oppresses women more than men; that patriarchy shapes this construction; and that women’s experiential knowledge is a basis for a future non-sexist society” (Humm 194). Thus, views on gender and traits attributed to males and females are subjective and can be overcome. For instance, in Alias Grace, Dr. Jordan recalls a memory from his childhood where he sneaks into a servant’s bedroom and remembers “she’d been angry with him, but couldn’t express her anger…so she’d done the womanly thing, and burst into tears” (Atwood 187). His choice of words shows how he sees women as feeble and overly emotional. Instead of being aggressive towards him, which is what men are known to be,