Compare how women are presented in ‘Of Mice and Men’ and ‘An Inspector Calls’.

In the play An Inspector Calls, Priestley uses different characters to portray women. At the start of the play, Sheila is seen as fragile, materialistic and inferior to the men in her life, which is typically the view of higher-class women. This is followed by the perspective of lower class women having excellent morals yet being disposable, which is seen through Eva Smith’s character. This contradicts to Mrs Birling’s control on others and her strong social class views.

In An Inspector Calls the theme of gender inequality is explored comprehensively. In the play, most of the women are portrayed as feeble characters, unable to make decisions for themselves. Many people often think this of Sheila, who the men feel needs protecting from lots of things, like the information that a girl has committed suicide. The play was set in 1912 when the patriarchal society was the norm. So the women that were in the play would have been seen as possessions to their husband and therefore did not work or have careers. However it would have been accepted for women to participate in charity work as Mrs Birling was. Apart from that, women would have been simply seen as wives and mothers not workers and fighters. Women did not have the same rights as men most notably women did not even have the right to vote. The

Eva smith was a hard worker in his company, but Birling fired her as she demanded for a pay rise and was one of the main ring leaders. Birling didn?t take notice on what would happen to Eva smith after she left his works, and what happened to her after that, and what would lead her to suicide. A chain of events which he had started. Which reflects on Priestleys main aim, our actions affect people around us.

Through Joseph Heller’s works it is shown that women appear to be less honorable than men. He shows through tone, syntax, and connotation how women play more insignificant roles when it comes to the plot.

Women were regard as a second class of people. They had neither legal right nor respect from their male counterparts. When the narrator's husband, John, a

In the early 20th century, a male author, John Steinbeck, wrote about women’s oppression in the short story, “The Chrysanthemums”. It was different than other stories about women’s oppression because it was in the male point-of-view rather than a female’s point-of-view. This brilliant short story is narrated by a third-person narrator and has some interesting characters such as Elisa, Henry and the traveling salesperson. In John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums”, the juxtaposition between female and male norms and the symbolism throughout the story illustrates how women were perceived as simplistic and weak people reflected by the gender expectations in the early 20th century.

While both the “Invisible Man” and “The House of Mirth” were written near the same time frame, they were written in differing perspectives, reflecting not only social classes but also gender roles of the time period. At the time these books were written, men and women had very different roles in society. Women were in the midst of a long arduous battle of the women suffrage movement and as they gained ground in this fight the gender roles started to change along with the country: “Westward expansion also demanded that many women step outside prescribed gender roles and perform “men’s” work on the frontier” (Jolliffe 1). Men, on the other hand, had a battle of their own trying to defend their masculinity during the movement of women into new social ranks, “masculinity in the United States is certain only in its uncertainty; its stability and sense of well-being depend on a frantic drive to control its environment.” (Stryffeler 4) The struggles of this dynamic time period are expressed through the eyes of these two authors giving readers an idea of how women were viewed differently from men surrounding the gender and social issues that dominated history.

Over the course of many years, women have struggled to expand their roles and rights in society, hoping to one day achieve complete equality with their male counterparts. Two women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Judy (Syfers) Brady, both recognized the patriarchal society in which women had to endure. They despised the way it heaped inequality and servitude upon women, and decided to assert their opinion on the issue in order to change the perceptions and imposed limitations on women. In Stanton’s speech, “Declaration of Sentiments”, and in Brady’s article, “I Want a Wife”, both women attempt to convince their audiences that females deserve complete equality with men by stating the submissive situations and obligations women find themselves immersed in. This is done to get their female audiences to reevaluate how they have been treated and give them a second chance at attaining equality. Both women employ various rhetorical techniques in their arguments to strengthen, as well as compel other women to oppose the ‘domesticated’ image of women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Judy (Syfers) Brady expressed their views in pursuance of forging a path to a revamped lifestyle for women.

Some critics have advanced the notion that one of the reasons there is such a paucity of women and of strong, beneficent women in particular within this story is due to what they represented in typical Victorian England society. Women were generally viewed as "a social force or a source of authority" which "reinforces this fiction of coherent male identity" (Doane and Hodges 63). This quotation suggests the fact that women were generally the keepers of morality and virtue within Victorian

Throughout this play JB Priestly has included a range of female characters in the play, from an upper class snob, through a mature daughter and a working class girl. However Eva Smith, the working class girl, was the only character who suffered the most because of her gender, she was treated differently by all character throughout the play. She had no value in society what so ever and we’ve seen this on many different occasions, firstly when Mr.Birling talks about her and quotes, “We were paying the usual rates and if they didn’t like those rates, they could go work somewhere else”, this quote informs us about Mr.Birling views

In this essay, I will compare and contrast the presentation of relationship of the two novels ‘of Mice and men’ and ‘An Inspector calls. ‘Of Mice and Men’ is a novella and was written in the 1937 by John Steinbeck. "Of Mice and Men" takes place in the 1930's in Salinas Valley (the hometown of Steinbeck) in California during the great depression. John Steinbeck (35) wrote this novella to show us the challenges and unfairness of the life of a migrant worker. The novella starts off with two migrant workers, George and Lennie. Who have been let off bus miles away from the California farm where they are due to start work. There main objective is to find work, buy a farm and leave peacefully but due to reality this American dream will not come true.

In life many people have gender expectations such as women should stay home and clean the house, take care of the kids, cook, etc. For men they have the expectation to work hard to pay the bills and put food on the table. The book Raisin in the Sun and Of Mice and Men, many characters catch this stereotypical energy. In today’s generation people see society expecting a certain gender to do certain things everyday. For an example, in the book Of Mice and Men, Crooks stated,”Candy's face had grown redder and redder, but before she was done speaking, he had control of himself. He was the master of the situation. "I might of knew," he said gently. "Maybe you just better go along an' roll your hoop. We ain't got nothing to say to you at all. We know what we got, and we don't care whether you know it or not." This shows that Crooks thought that he was weak because he wasn’t able to shoot the dog but he was strong enough to deal with Curley’s wife.

This was good new for upper-class men like Mr Birling and Gerald Croft, but was clearly very bad news for women like Eva Smith, who were forced to work in servicing jobs such as maids, servants, or factory workers. This leads to another key factor of attitudes towards women; the fact that they have to go to extremes to survive, let alone live comfortably. One of the events that set in motion the train of events leading to Eva’s suicide is the injustices she faced at work under Arthur Birling’s company. Mr Birling clearly shows how bad younger women were treated without giving it a second thought, as he states ‘they wanted rates so they could average twenty-five shillings a week. I refused of course’ which shows just how unsympathetic aristocrats like Arthur were back then..

Throughout history, women have been viewed as inferior to men, being portrayed as weak, less intelligent, and dependent on men. This point of view has been exemplified in many literary works by creating a male dominant society. In A Tale of Two Cities, written by Charles Dickens, the female characters unlike the male, are all created as if to say that women are not capable of being well rounded people. Dickens’ portrayal of women in A Tale of Two Cities is problematic because rather than craft well-rounded characters, as he does with many of the male characters, he portrays them as beautiful but stereotypically weak, clever but crazy, and unattractive yet brave.

Often, two people who have endured similar life experiences and share an unmistakable parallel in lifestyles can be viewed as duplicates of one individual. In Sense and Sensibility, the two main characters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood can be seen as two extensions of the same character. The sisters are relatively close in age, grew up with the same social expectations of the same time period and household, and they evidently experienced similar childhood and family trauma and problems. Although it could be argued that they are the same character, these young women are very different from each other, in respects to their roles and practice of responsibility, their display of emotions, and openness to love. Jane Austen has cleverly titled