Moravcsik, Ibsen, and Mill: Gender Roles and Ideas of Freedom in
“Why I Put My Wife’s Career First,” A Doll’s House, and On the Subjection of Women
Women have historically been relegated to domestic roles, while men have been designated for more public roles. As a means of helping women in the struggle for gender equality, nineteenth-century Western writers began to detail the faulty factors that contributed to the problem. Some authors, including John Stuart Mill with his book The Subjection of Women, argued that women had proven themselves capable of handling similar pressures to men in both the workplace and the home. Writers such as Henrik Ibsen also explored the ways social rules affected women as they attempted to exert some power in …show more content…
Torvald does not view Nora as an equal, and assumes that Nora is incapable of helping him with practical matters; instead, her responsibility within the household is “merely to perform tricks” for her husband, while he controls the more practical matters (66). Through his characterization of Nora and Torvald’s marriage, Ibsen argues that the power and responsibility inequality constructed by society is detrimental. Similarly, Mill rejects the “dull and hopeless life” which society sentences all women to “by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities which many of them are conscious of” (Mill 107-108). He also idealizes an equal approach to a marriage, describing a couple “between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them [...] this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage” (102). He describes a paradigm in which the husband and wife share in responsibilities equally, and simultaneously criticizes any relationship in which there is a differing distribution. From the
“Why I Put My Wife’s Career First,” A Doll’s House, and On the Subjection of Women
Women have historically been relegated to domestic roles, while men have been designated for more public roles. As a means of helping women in the struggle for gender equality, nineteenth-century Western writers began to detail the faulty factors that contributed to the problem. Some authors, including John Stuart Mill with his book The Subjection of Women, argued that women had proven themselves capable of handling similar pressures to men in both the workplace and the home. Writers such as Henrik Ibsen also explored the ways social rules affected women as they attempted to exert some power in …show more content…
Torvald does not view Nora as an equal, and assumes that Nora is incapable of helping him with practical matters; instead, her responsibility within the household is “merely to perform tricks” for her husband, while he controls the more practical matters (66). Through his characterization of Nora and Torvald’s marriage, Ibsen argues that the power and responsibility inequality constructed by society is detrimental. Similarly, Mill rejects the “dull and hopeless life” which society sentences all women to “by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities which many of them are conscious of” (Mill 107-108). He also idealizes an equal approach to a marriage, describing a couple “between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them [...] this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage” (102). He describes a paradigm in which the husband and wife share in responsibilities equally, and simultaneously criticizes any relationship in which there is a differing distribution. From the