The Rights Of Women In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Since the early 1900s, and arguably, quite some time before that, there has been a exceptionally strong push for women’s rights in western society. While the early movements were extremely white focused, and we still focus on the year 1916 in which women were able to vote, there has been a lot of progress that has been done since then. Often, people will now specify that white, wealthy women got the right to vote, and that right got withheld from women of colour, as well as women of lower class. Similarly to the fact that we have progressed greatly from women’s rights since the 1900s, by examining texts from the late middle ages, it becomes apparent that a great deal of progress has been made. In these texts, women were often depicted as being …show more content…
First, in regards to being subordinate to God, it is helpful to look at the first few lines in the prologue. In this excerpt, she is detailing her previous experience as a married woman. She details that she had been married five times, and she states that “Christ ne wente nevere but onis” (Chaucer 10). By her stating that Christ only went to one of her weddings, that being the first wedding, we can see that God has turned his back on her, even though she was fully justified in leaving her previous marriages. She compares her marriage situation to the ones of the bible stories of Abraham and his sons. She illuminates the discriminatory nature of God and his rules, and how they tend to discriminate women, or at least, are more lenient when it comes to how men are treated in response to them defying the same expectations that the Wife of Bath defied. The Wife states that she knows that both Abraham and Jacob were both holy men, but both of them had more than two wives (55-57). The Wife of Bath takes issue with these marriages, as God had never forbade their multiple marriages through any of the biblical stories, yet she is being chastised religiously for having multiple marriages. By becoming aware of this contradictory nature of the rule of God, readers are able to be more critical …show more content…
The most clear examples of the subjugation of women in this text can be found in the fourth book of the story. Milton’s detached, omniscient, third person narrative voice states the order of value in regards to gender. There is explicit statement of gender inequality in the text, as the narrator claims that their sexes are “not equal seemed” (Milton 296). This unequal nature between men and women is created directly by who God is willing to make himself directly accessible to. The narrator states that in men, there is god, which implies that there is a direct relationship between god and man, yet there is no god in woman. The woman must instead worship the man as god, as that is her closest possible chance to connect with God. By having her link to God limited, it is clear that god has decided who is more important, and who deserves his attention more. This is not a purely artistic choice for Milton to include either, as the footnote of this line points towards 2 Corinthians 11.3, which is the story of Paul and the False Apostles. In this story, Paul is talking to his disciples and uses Eve’s tendency to give in to temptation of the serpent as an example to not fall for false gods. By pointing towards this scripture, it seems as though Eve cannot be blamed for falling to the serpent’s temptations as her relationship with god would have been