The Yellow Wallpaper Gender Roles

Gender roles are a thing of the past, present and future. They separate the specific duties in which a man and a woman can or can’t do. Today many of the traditional gender roles are non-existent, women are becoming incredibly independent in this generation compared to generations in the past. The role women were forced to play, and the feminist movement of the past, changed the way women live in this generation.
Women are becoming the “breadwinners”. We often see single women taking on both roles, caring for the children as well as working a full-time job. Today women are so independent that the marriage rates in the U.S. are declining. Although many individuals in the United States would say that women can do just about anything a man can …show more content…
Gender roles kept women from socializing with others, making friends, and kept them isolated in their homes. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was also a good interpretation of the status that men had, and how their opinions were valued far more than those of a woman. Anyone would have known that isolation should not have been the answer for the narrator, especially her husband who was a physician, this goes to show how little he cared for his wife’s well-being. The narrator went through very intense depression because of her isolation, because she didn’t have a choice but to clean and take care of things around the house.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” based on her own struggles with depression, and the rough first marriage that she when through. Gilman wrote about women wanting to be free, she wrote about women breaking away from the standard cooking and cleaning roles. Gilman believed that women deserved to be intellectuals, she longed for the day that women could go out and get a job like any man could. For this woman looked to her work seeking answers, as well as inspiration (Radcliff Institute for Advance Study Harvard University