Revisionist Mythmaking: Revising History And Myth, By Eavan Boland

In the poem “It’s a Woman’s World,” Eavan Boland uses many poetic devices such as alliteration, simile, and enjambment in order to explain life from a woman’s point of view and how women have lived the same since the beginning of time.

After studying women and gender history in early America for the past semester, my views about American history have changed tremendously. Having very little prior experience with history, I had many assumptions and preconceived notions from high school history classes. Women were never even mentioned in my previous learning about U.S. history, so I assumed they took on unimportant roles and had little, if any, impact on shaping our country’s history. However, after this semester of delving deeply into the women of early America, I could not have been more incorrect. Although they were not typically in the public realm, we cannot fully understand history without studying women. The following readings uncovered the roles of women in the private sphere and were crucial to my new understanding of the importance of women in American history by bringing women to the forefront.

Despite the achievements of women in many different fields, society still attempts to limit women to certain roles. Furthermore, in the poem, women “… are defined […] by what [they] never will be,” (lines 19 - 21); once again, the author claims that women are defined by what they are unable to do because of gender bias. Instead of being given the chance to be influential, they are continually limited to staying at home or doing jobs “meant for women.” Finally, Boland tells the tutor that women “…were never on the scene of crime,” (lines 27 - 28). This serves as a metaphor for how women are never allowed to do important jobs; instead, they are left at the sidelines due to the repeatedly ignored restrictions placed on women by our gender-biased society.

Feminism is a prominent controversy in present times and is relevant through literary works. In the article, “Throwing like a Girl,” James Fallows analyzes that saying exactly for what it means in our society, and more importantly if there’s any truth to the stereotype. In the article, “Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich shows how feminist historians, by challenging traditional accounts of both men's and women's histories, have prompted more vibrant accounts of the past. While Fallows analyzes the styles of throwing to identify a possible theory of the stereotypical saying, “throwing like a girl,” Ulrich discusses and encourages women to be strong and accomplish their goals, by using her phrase “well behaved women seldom make history.”

Two-hundred years is a sizeable gap of time that allows plenty of room for change. American society had been rapidly changing from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, but despite this, the roles and rights of women have remained locked in place. There were many factors to consider as to why women were not allowed to flourish in their time and exceed these boundaries, and while some accepted it, there were many that opposed and faced these difficulties head on. Two female authors, one from colonial times, and one from nineteenth century America, have written about the obstacles and misogyny they’ve overcome in a male dominated literary career. Despite the two-hundred-year gap between the lives of Margaret Fuller and Anne Bradstreet, they both face issues regarding the static stereotype that women are literarily inferior and subservient handmaids to men.

History has always been heavily dominated by men, and for women to earn a spot in history means that they would need to do something extraordinary. In “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, she points out several famous women in history that fit the mold of extraordinary. Through discussing Mae West, Rosa Parks, and Martha Ballard, Ulrich makes the claim that women rarely make history unless they have broken away from the norms of their society. By explaining the individual historical cases and her own opinion, accompanied by visual representations of her view, Ulrich argues how history dictates who gets a spot in history and who gets forgotten. However, a place in history depends on how out of the ordinary

In 2007, Laurel Ulrich, wrote Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, from which there is an essay that speaks on history, and how women have been left out. She wrote this as a result of her newfound fame due to a phrase in her 1976 journal article; this phrase would ultimately give her 2007 article it’s name. In her essay, her goal is to write about the lack of women in history as a whole; she then illustrates the type of women who by a turn of fate make it into history. Her point being that on few occasions women are written in history books, and even when they are, they are not the women who lead ordinary lives; most of the history that include women is tied to some groundbreaking or exotic

Women of the Republic, is a non-fiction book written off of the finding of women’s journals and other personal recordings in the eighteenth century. Linda K. Kerber is the author of the book; she is an American Feminist historian and also an educator who specializes in the democratic mind in America and also the history of women in America. The book is drawn from the direct testimony of women from letters, diaries, and legal records. Women of the Republic describes: women’s participation in the war, evaluates changes in women’s education in the late eighteenth century, and analyzes their status in law and society.

The postcorrective historiography of Why Stories Matter convincingly questions the belief that securing more accurate narratives of the past is possible and desirable. Hemmings intentionally sidesteps the philosophical question at the heart of most histories and historiographies: Are more accurate and unexpected renderings of the past in existence, waiting to be uncovered? Hemmings’s concerns are epistemological: what matters is how the past is depicted and what is remembered or forgotten as a result. They are also methodological: feminist scholars need the requisite tools to understand how the past is portrayed and how it might be portrayed differently. The existential question remains unanswered, which in her view leaves room for “unpredictability” in conceptualizing the past. One’s reply to the question depends largely on how one defines their source base, however. Although the extensiveness of Hemmings’s study is astonishing, her study begins and ends with feminist theory and the affective impulses escaping feminist theory’s discursive threshold (and inadvertently shaping it). Therefore, the social, cultural, economic, and geopolitical forces that do not fall under the category of feminist theory, such as structural and institutional relationships and forces that make possible the production of academic feminism, cannot be included as part of its history. Why should the scope of feminist history be limited to only what feminist scholars have published? Important factors

The view of a “woman’s world” may be seen as simple or complex. When it comes to having a complex conception of a “woman’s world,” Eavan Boland is the person to have that type of conception. In his poem, It’s a Woman’s World, Eavan Boland reveals his complex conception of a “woman’s world” by using pathos to appeal to the readers emotions and evoke sympathy, allusion, and metaphors. Boland begins to use pathos to appeal to the reader’s emotions and evoke sympathy in order to reveal his complex conception of a “woman’s world.” He begins by saying that “life has hardly changed” from the invention of the wheel and that “maybe flame burns more greedily and wheels are steadier but we’re the same.”

1. Women's lives have changed enormously this century and the actions of women themselves have played a vital role in the transformation. Putting women back into history is about giving individual women their history, but it should also be about making some collective sense out of women's divergent experiences.

Isabella Crawford’s, “Said the Canoe”, identifies her as one with radical intentions to challenge the expected behaviour of women and broaden the way they were seen in society by presenting them in a socially unacceptable manner. This essay will consider how Crawford’s education, upbringing, perception of society, use of metaphor in this poem specifically, and writing style culminated in her creating this poem, which prompted women to later be seen in outside the Victorian stereotype. English literary scholar, Fred Cogswell, goes as far as calling Crawford a feminist in his essay, “Feminism in Isabella Valency Crawford’s “Said the Canoe”. Alternatively, for the purpose of this essay, I will not be labelling Crawford a feminist as the term was not yet established when the poem was written. However, I will be using Cogswell’s essay to support the argument of Crawford advocating for women’s rights.

This powerful statement from Hillary Clinton underpins the injustices of female representation in the past. This silence is evident in the Bible verse, ‘Let your women keep silent in the churches,’ (I Corinthians 14: 34-37) and Virginia Woolf’s concept that “Anon … was often a woman [who could not otherwise get the respect of male counterparts].” (Virginia Woolf, 1928, A Room of One’s Own. PAGE). These are only two examples of how females have been largely disempowered by the male constraints of literature. In recent history feminists have deemed it necessary to research the lost and forgotten females and retell history from a distinctly female perspective. This issue is of significant concern to Carol Ann Duffy, the current Poet Laureate. Duffy subverts fairytales, myths and historical stories to empower women, giving them a voice and allowing their stories to be heard. This essay will argue that Carol Ann Duffy presents a feminist perspective in the poem ‘Little Red Cap’.

Feminism is defined as the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. Eavan Boland and Anne sexton share more than just their love of poetry, they both incorporated female struggles and feminist ideas into their poetry. In a close reading of the poems Her Kind, by Anne Sexton and Anorexic, by Eavan Boland, the themes and the overall feel and struggles of the characters in both poems are very similar; they both use historical and biblical references that demean women and they both use strong female stereotypes that are going through personal struggles. Both characters are empowered

Identity and its construction is a theme which is widely explored throughout poetry. It is a common topic between writers and can be discussed and approached from a variety of angles. When examining the theme of identity within poetry, it appears as a particularly reoccurring topic throughout the work of female Irish poets. There are many factors that contribute to this. This essay will use two Irish female poets and their work in order to outline these factors. Eavan Boland and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain are both female Irish poets whose work focuses primarily on the issue of identity as a fragile, constructed thing. This essay will use close examination of both Boland and Ni Chuilleanain’s work in order to explore how two separate female poets deal with the topic of identity. It will primarily focus on female identity and how it is difficult for women to break free from their stereotypical and expected behaviour. It will outline both the similarities and the differences between their approaches to the theme. It will discuss how the poets deal with the theme of identity under headings such as female stereotypes and sexuality, a shared recuperation of domestic life, the motif of the journey within poetry and a lack of ‘real’ women within myths and national history. This essay will also highlight how a lack of matrilineal ancestors mean that many women are deemed to adhere to a romanticized and unrealistic form of female identity.