What's That Smell In The Kitchen By Marge Piercy

Superior Essays
Women in the 20th century and prior always carried an image with them that they were expected to adhere to. More precisely, they were stuck in a mold. But as decades passed, that mold slowly began to crack. Presently, we are no longer expected to fit in the confines of that mold. Women are allowed more freedoms and judged less strictly on what they choose to do with their lives. However, even with the progressive change women’s lives have taken, they are still seen as a less desirable gender to the overall population. The theoretical mold they thought they had broken free from still lingers in the minds of some and is still remembered clearly.
Steven Doloff’s essay “The Opposite Sex” supports this as he summarized his findings from over a
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If you were told to picture her what would you see? Usually, the answer is along the lines of a woman done up with her hair curled and heels on, cooking dinner as she waits for her husband and children to come home. This domestic role was placed upon women in those eras and the preceding ones. However, this isn’t how they planned to spend the rest of their lives. Women began to slowly revolt. They were sick of the expectations and silently pushed against their roles. In the poem What’s That Smell in the Kitchen by Marge Piercy, which I chose as my second source, she gives a good image of how they did this by stating that wives were burning their dinners in retaliation to their treatment. “Look, she says, once I was roast duck on your platter with parsley but now I am spam.- Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.” (Piercy, 20-22). While they may not have been the next Alice Paul, housewives have been and currently are protesting the roles of homemaker; they are marrying later or taking jobs along with the husband. They also took on new roles as independents. In today’s society women can be fully independent and are making a change away from the homemaking lifestyle to being home owners on their own. “In Daum 's life, one of continual and energetic cross-country moving, the search for the perfect domicile is less practical than wildly emotional — so emotional that at times she has literally no room …show more content…
In their employer’s and coworker’s eyes no woman should be out of the home or their family’s eyesight. “The maternal wall, the ideal worker, and the ideal homemaker beliefs are current iterations of the century-old tendency to mark women as suited for the home and men as suited for the workplace (Albee & Perry, 1998; Coltrane,1996; Mintz, 2000).” (Barnett, pg. 667) They were seen as incompetent or that their male coworkers were more qualified in their jobs. “Early research using self-report measures demonstrate that people value ‘‘masculine’’ traits more than ‘‘feminine’’ traits and hold less positive attitudes toward women than toward men” (Hartman & Judd, 1978). Even in today’s society women make up an extremely miniscule amount of CEO’s and leader positions. There also remains a very noticeable wage gap between men and women with women making approximately 80 cents to every man’s dollar. With all these negative correlations to women, why would any man be excited at the thought of trading sexes, even if only for a day, with a woman? “Some men wrote that they would not choose to be a woman because social norms make life more difficult for women than for men ‘‘even in this enlightened day and age.’’ For example, one man stated: ‘‘Women are universally oppressed to some degree or another. Not fun.’’ (Byers, pg. 153) With this insight as to how men still see women,

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