Feminism : A Feminist Perspective

Writer, feminist theorist, and professor Sara Ahmed wrote Living a Feminist Life alongside her blog feministkilljoys.com. She started writing it before and completed it after her resignation in 2016 from her post as director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths at the University of London after a lengthy struggle to hold the school accountable for incidents of sexual harassment on campus (Ahmed, n.d.). Her resignation, and location both in and out of the academy informed a lot of the content of this book. In her work, Ahmed successfully argues that feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at work and at home. Living a Feminist Life is well supported through Ahmed’s

Traditionally, men have held the power in society. Women have been treated as a second class of citizens with neither the legal rights nor the respect of their male counterparts. Culture has contributed to these gender roles by conditioning women to accept their subordinate status while encouraging young men to lead and control. Feminist criticism contends that literature either supports society’s patriarchal structure or provides social criticism in order to change this hierarchy. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts one women’s struggle against the traditional female role into which society attempts to force her and the societal reaction

Kate Chopin’s the most well-known work The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” both initially published in 1899, present astoundingly analogous stories of the role of women in society. Both texts are narrated from the point of view of a female protagonist who breaks away from the restraining conventions of a male-ruled society before eventually emancipating through separation from the thinking world, via suicide in The Awakening and insanity in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Some would argue that the narrators are unreliable and the stories are misrepresented simply because

While women have achieved equality along with political and social independence in many ways over the past century, contemporary feminist movements continue to blossom as gender expectations and stereotypes remain deeply embedded in our culture. Today and in the past, feminist notions about the social norms that limit women's possibilities have yearned for expression and have found this through various artistic outlets. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin, and the 1944 Film Gaslight are three artistic works that relay feminist themes in a unique way. These three works differ in certain aspects, but all ultimately embody the same underlying theme of the oppression and liberation.

   In their works, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin show that freedom was not universal in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The three works, "The Yellow Wallpaper," "At the 'Cadian Ball," and "The Storm" expose the oppression of women by society.  This works also illustrate that those women who were passive in the face of this oppression risk losing not only their identity, but their sanity as well.

Female Liberation in The Awakening and “The Yellow Wallpaper” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow WallPaper,” both initially published in 1899, present strikingly similar stories of the plight of women in society. Both texts adopt a markedly feminist bias, narrated from the point of view of a female protagonist who wrests with the restrictive conventions of a misogynistic society before finally breaking free through separation from the thinking world, via suicide in The Awakening and insanity in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Some would argue that the women themselves are flawed, through either mental instability or rampant libido, and thus the stories are skewed through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Yet what is significant is the realization that both women would rather forsake sanity and life than endure the shackles of subjugation, because separation from the conscious world is the only way to achieve complete liberation in an oppressive androcentric society.

Topics of great social impact have been dealt with in many different ways and in many different mediums. Beginning with the first women’s movement in the 1850’s, the role of women in society has been constantly written about, protested, and debated. Two women writers who have had the most impact in the on-going women’s movement are Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper are two of feminist literature’s cornerstones and have become prolific parts of American literature. Themes of entrapment by social dictates, circumstance, and the desire for personal independence reside within each work and bond the two together.

Feminists have fought for equality between men and women. They have raised awareness for all those women being degraded not only by society but by their families because everyone believes that it is the right thing to do, they did not know any other way and it took strong, independent women to open the eyes of society. Authors such as Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman communicated the struggle women went through and the agony they had to live with knowing that they were no one to society but a birth giver and a person to keep a man company and make him look good to society. The authors protagonists have rebelled and challenged the roles given to them in hopes to free themselves from the chains no one realized were there. Those chains were influenced by many things, but the most significant one being the social status men had to hold and the importance of caring what people had to say. Men had to ‘form’ their wives into women acceptable for society. This lead to women violating social laws and breaking everything they were ever told to do. In the end women till this day fight for equality in hopes to one day end patriarchy as a

The subject of feminism has evolved into various complex theories. In addition, feminism has also been a heavily debated issue that has been around for numerous years. The argument of feminism is that women are, and always have been throughout history, treated differently than men by society. Therefore, women are being stripped down of opportunities to their benefit economically, socially, politically, and culturally. Since there are multiple theories on feminism, Donald Hall’s definition of cultural feminism, from his “Feminist Analysis” of Literary and Cultural Theory, will be used to explore the cultural aspects of the texts from Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, Charlotte Gilman’s short story ”The Yellow Wallpaper,”

Jaeline De La Cruz Mrs. Kehrmeyer A.P. English – P.1 5 November 2015 Feminist Analysis Feminism is the belief that women are and should be treated equally in all opportunities and social rights as to men. That discrimination should not be based on gender in which premises are quite diverse with the male and female power. Women’s roles have been controversial, this approaches opposing perspectives on gender roles in society. In his book, Literary and Cultural Theory, American poet and writer, Donald Hall, introduces the idea of feminist analysis that the “Key to all feminist methodologies is the belief that patriarchal oppression of women through history has been profound and multifaceted” (Hall 202). In other words, Hall argues that women have faced inequality under the oppression of men. This feminist analytical perspective has adapted to several generations of literature, since the early 19th century, and continues to explore the social roles of women. One of the many kinds of feminist analysis includes cultural feminism. Cultural feminism focuses on the cultural roles and stereotypical characteristics of women. It also reveals how women are seen more as assets rather than liabilities. Cultural feminism is an ideology of the way women have been denied in power. Feminist literary theory focuses on the differences between men and women and their assigned social roles. Authors like Kate Chopin, who wrote The Awakening and The Story of an Hour, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

Feminism is a movement towards equal society for both genders, male and female, without discrimination. We should be able to live our lives without having the fear of being judged and meeting the criteria assigned to each gender roles. In most feminist narratives, the protagonists of the text are led by a woman who seeks deliverance from the patriarchal oppression. The outcome of these problems is the blatant actions of women to disenthrall from the oppressive. Kate Chopin the author of the short story “The Story of an Hour” and the book The Awakening, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, portray the women’s resistance and the subverted patriarchal oppression they experienced by women accepting the forced assigned roles

In the early nineteen century, women were not explicitly part of literature. they were used male pseudonym to publish their works. However, later in the century, there was a shift in women’s implication in literature. women began to be publicly recognized as writers, and they were using their writings to advocate for women’s rights and to reject stereotypes that were commonly associated with them. For example, in the early nineteen century, books and novels were mostly describing “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” as attributes of a good woman (Fortin). Writings by women were describing women that where rejecting values of the patriarchal society; women that wanted freedom and independence. The writings of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman exemplify the features of the Feminist phase of female literary tradition. Published respectively in 1892 and 1895, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin are the quintessence of feminist literature. They both used characterization, setting, ad irony to protest a misogynistic society and to request women’s rights and autonomy.

Feminist criticism scrutinizes the ways in which literature reinforces or undermines the economic, politic, social and psychological oppression of women. One of the tools used

Important theorists, eye-opening articles, groundbreaking books, and activism has influenced my intellectual journal through feminist theory. Feminism is a contentious topic with matters that pertain to contemporary feminism, including the following: reproductive rights; equal access to education and employment; marriage equality; violence against women; and the sex trade. While these are only a few of the issues faced by feminists, it is evident that feminism has great value in today’s society. My journey with feminism began in high school when a professor shared negative assumptions associated with my gender and Aboriginal heritage. This alone was motivation for me to pursue women’s studies, specifically on marginalized populations.

When one hears the term “Feminism”, she/he may have the idea that it is the urge and