The Importance Of Women In Edna's Awakening By Kate Chopin

When the topic of childbearing is presented, women are the ones who have the biggest decision to make. “‘ Surely, if there is any personal question which an individual has a right to decide, the woman should have a voice in the matter of childbearing. She has to endure the pains, penalties and responsibilities, both before and afterward, and she can best judge of her fitness and her powers of endurance’”(Yalom 301). Men believe that women are inferior to them, therefore the decision of having children is up to the husband. If the husband does not want to have a baby, then they would not have children. Though when it comes to taking care of a child, that is the job of women. Mr. Pontellier, Edna’s husband, believes, “If it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it?”(Chopin 48). Women are excepted to only follow this role of taking care of children, which Edna lacks the ability to do because …show more content…
Once women obtained some sense of freedom, they have only been held back. When Edna in the novel starts acting in the way she wants, without listening to her husband and behaving as she wishes, her husband becomes worried. “‘She has let the housekeeping go to the dickens…She’s got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women’”(Chopin 117-118). Her husband instantly goes to the doctor for help, assuming that something is seriously wrong with her, though the doctor reassures him that is it a phase. Women, in the beginning of becoming their own, had to face many instances of men assuming they are medically ill. “Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husband of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude; at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement”(Henslin 73). While women do not com pain of their husbands, husbands complain about their