Roles of Women Essay

Submitted By trevs02
Words: 881
Pages: 4

The Roles of Women The roles of women has always been a very gray area for the world. In each and every society there are different rules and regulations based solely on you gender. Even some religions have different rules for both genders. Women have battled gender inequality for hundreds of years, and even today are still fighting to be recognized as equal to men. The general mindset towards women is that they were put on Earth to look pretty, keep the circle of life going, and keep their mouths shut. They are trained this all the way down to toddler ages. They are given dolls to play, they are constantly exposed to advertisements featuring beautiful women who everyone strives to be. But the harsh reality is, those women do not exist. So, they are being set up to fail from the very beginning. Even if you wanted to claim that you have never experienced any kind of gender inequality first hand, there are plenty of written examples, nonfiction or nonfiction, that reflect the way that society views women. For example, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is full of examples of the main character being locked in a room to help her depression after having her baby, because she was weak and she needed to recover. As the story progresses, we see that she is questioning her brother’s and husband’s methods of treating her, which it becomes clear very quickly that maybe she is correct. But, the main point of the excerpt in which she states, “John is a Physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a living soul of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) - perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” (Gilman 76). In this excerpt, we can see that she would never dare question her husband or her brother in public. Even though she knows that the treatment is not working very effectively, she dares not question her husband and brother’s authority, unless she is in the safety of her own writing. Judging by this, we can see that in the time frame that this story was written, women were probably ignored if they tried to question a man’s thought process, especially if it involved something as complicated as medicine and treatments. This excerpt also proves the power of the gender inequalities, the main character knows something is wrong, and suspects very strongly that the treatment she is being giving is not working, yet she does not say a word about it. When the story nears the ended we see that the main character was right in her assumption that her treatment was not working. We see that by the end of the story she has almost completely lost her mind because of the treatment. In comparison to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” also shows signs of gender inequalities. He shows gender inequalities through the characters Judy and Irene. Judy is a character whom is bitter, rich, beautiful, and spoiled. She is one of the two stereotypes of women in this story, in which, Irene being the other. Irene is the soft, kind, goody two shoes, woman who every man wants but does not realize they want. Judy is the girl that men always go after because she is beautiful and exciting. The main character Dexter even mentions that, “...he could not have Judy Jones.”