Window of the Soul: How Writing Allows Expression of the Human Condition Throughout every society’s history, there has been a prevalent inequality between the females and males of that population. Women were considered slaves or property belonging to men; thus they have been viewed as second-class citizens and intellectual inferiors. The result of this prejudice was to restrict woman’s lives exclusively in the domestic sphere. This limitation severely controlled their interactions and occupations within the public sphere The women against this status quo remained voiceless. Commonly their frustrations with the unequal society structure was commonly expressed through writing. In both Lee Smith’s Dimestore and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The
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Smith grew up in a small town where the conventional women remained solely mothers and wives. Smith’s home environment consisted of her mother cooking meals, cleaning the house and waiting for her husband to come home from work. This behavior, as the doting wife, was something that Smith knew she did not want for herself. She wanted to make more of her life and follow what she was passionate about, writing. She would write in a journal much as Perkins Gilman had done in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Her reaction to these social norms wasn’t as harsh as Charlotte’s but they were dealt with by the same solution. She thought that her mom cooking dinner and waiting for her father was just love. She wrote, “Our perfect dinner was ready every night at 6:30, the time a family ought to eat, in Mama’s opinion, thought my workaholic daddy never got home from the dimestore until at eight or nine at the earliest” (Smith 36). She understands that her mother’s one job is to take care of the home and her husband, just as Charlotte knew about her own life, but where they differed was Smith’s ability to reject these traditions without as much resistance was Perkins Gilman. This is primarily having to do with the hundred years separating these women’s
Smith grew up in a small town where the conventional women remained solely mothers and wives. Smith’s home environment consisted of her mother cooking meals, cleaning the house and waiting for her husband to come home from work. This behavior, as the doting wife, was something that Smith knew she did not want for herself. She wanted to make more of her life and follow what she was passionate about, writing. She would write in a journal much as Perkins Gilman had done in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Her reaction to these social norms wasn’t as harsh as Charlotte’s but they were dealt with by the same solution. She thought that her mom cooking dinner and waiting for her father was just love. She wrote, “Our perfect dinner was ready every night at 6:30, the time a family ought to eat, in Mama’s opinion, thought my workaholic daddy never got home from the dimestore until at eight or nine at the earliest” (Smith 36). She understands that her mother’s one job is to take care of the home and her husband, just as Charlotte knew about her own life, but where they differed was Smith’s ability to reject these traditions without as much resistance was Perkins Gilman. This is primarily having to do with the hundred years separating these women’s