Women’s Rights Progression From the 18th Century to Current Time
For as long as time immemorial, women have sought freedom from being regarded as second-class citizens as their male counterparts – namely, their husbands. In home and family life, women were expected to restrict their interests to the household and family matters, while the rest of the matters were handled by the husband. Women were not even able to own property, earn wages, sign a contract, or vote in politics. In more recent times, decades and even centuries after intense political activism, women eventually started to gain the rights they never had before. One writer who touched on this topic extensively was Kate Chopin, especially seen in her work titled “The Story of an …show more content…
This is similar in theme to the freedom Kate Chopin touched upon in her short story “The Story of an Hour.” Once Mrs. Mallard finds of her husband’s “death,” she starts to feel free, as if the chains holding her back suddenly became broken. She started “drinking in a very elixir of life,” feeling a sense of a renewed life free from the “imposed private will.” “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 88). Mrs. Mallard unexpectedly finds the emancipation she long awaited for. Her life was fully in the hands of her “now deceased” husband, but now she feels determined to form a life of her own, chanting “free, free, free” as if she were just released from a prison for a crime she did not commit. She seems to have found inspiration and confidence to reject the traditional role of a housewife. We also see her carrying herself “unwittingly like a goddess of Victory” (Chopin 88). There are many chains that were holding women back from their independence in the 19th century, we see that Mrs. Mallard found this freedom as did women at the turn of the 20th
For as long as time immemorial, women have sought freedom from being regarded as second-class citizens as their male counterparts – namely, their husbands. In home and family life, women were expected to restrict their interests to the household and family matters, while the rest of the matters were handled by the husband. Women were not even able to own property, earn wages, sign a contract, or vote in politics. In more recent times, decades and even centuries after intense political activism, women eventually started to gain the rights they never had before. One writer who touched on this topic extensively was Kate Chopin, especially seen in her work titled “The Story of an …show more content…
This is similar in theme to the freedom Kate Chopin touched upon in her short story “The Story of an Hour.” Once Mrs. Mallard finds of her husband’s “death,” she starts to feel free, as if the chains holding her back suddenly became broken. She started “drinking in a very elixir of life,” feeling a sense of a renewed life free from the “imposed private will.” “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 88). Mrs. Mallard unexpectedly finds the emancipation she long awaited for. Her life was fully in the hands of her “now deceased” husband, but now she feels determined to form a life of her own, chanting “free, free, free” as if she were just released from a prison for a crime she did not commit. She seems to have found inspiration and confidence to reject the traditional role of a housewife. We also see her carrying herself “unwittingly like a goddess of Victory” (Chopin 88). There are many chains that were holding women back from their independence in the 19th century, we see that Mrs. Mallard found this freedom as did women at the turn of the 20th