Susan Glaspell 's A Jury Of Her Peers And Flannery O ' Connor 's Good Country People Essay

In the 21st century, many women, myself included, take for granted that we can wear whatever we desire and say what we want, in public, without the fear of being thrown in jail. However, that was not always the case. While the fight for the continued advance of women’s rights rages on, women of the 19th century lived a very different life than the one, us women, lead today. The feminist agenda was just emerging on the horizon. One particular woman was preparing to do her part to further the cause of women’s rights: Sarah Willis Parker. Parker was better known by her pen name, Fanny Fern. After facing and overcoming extreme adversity, she made the decision to start writing. To understand how truly ground breaking Fanny Fern was, we need to understand that in a 1997 edition of an anthology of American satire from colonial times to present, Fern was the only woman writer from the 19th century in that text. Her satiric style and controversial subject matter was just what the oppressed needed to gain some support and give them a voice.

The American literary canon presents a one sided view of women, due to the dominance of male authors. Classic American books generally present images of women in a male-centered viewpoint, creating a biased representation of women in literature. In “Feminist Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to Decadence,” Anne Barbeau Gardiner states that the American literary canon is “strikingly narrow…prepared by white men whose judgment was prejudiced and whose language was full of gendered meanings.” (Gardiner 395). Gardiner

Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.

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.

Rebecca Harding Davis was a groundbreaking author whose work, Life in the Iron Mills, examined a socioeconomic system that failed some while keeping others empowered. The issues of power and social class that are embedded in the work prompts readers to look closer at the unskilled immigrant laborers, whose living and working conditions were deplorable, and compare them to the capitalists and wealthy mill owners whose financial success rested mainly on the workers who were being marginalized. The narrator’s call to the readers, “Stop a moment…hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,” is actualized through the eyes of the middle and upper class gentlemen who visit the mill on what the narrator refers to as “the crisis of [Hugh’s] life” (Davis). Though the narrator’s voice eases the

Since the time of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, there have been great improvements in women’s rights. By modern standards, Faulkner would likely be considered sexist. Yet, in the confederate south, during the civil war, how Faulkner portrays southern womanhood and the capabilities of women are very progressive. Faulkner uses Granny and Drusilla to portray women in the south as smart, independent, and strong-willed to show the power of women.

Both Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants and John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums portray oppressed female characters in the early 1900s. In Hemingway’s short, Jig is oppressed by her lover known only as “The American,” whereas, the main character in The Chrysanthemums, Elisa Allen, feels the weight of oppression from society (male dominated) as a whole. Although the driving force of the two women’s subjugation varies slightly, their emotional responses to such are what differentiate the two.

Life in the Iron Mills is a novella that is hard to classify as a specific genre. The genre that fits the most into this novella is realism, because of the separation of classes, the hard work that a person has to put into their every day life to try and make a difference, and the way society influences the actions of people and their relationships. However, no matter what genre is specifically chosen, there will be other genres present that contradict the genre of choice. While the novella shows romanticism, naturalism, and realism, this essay is specifically centered around realism. The ultimate theme in Rebecca Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills is the separation of classes and gender. It is the separation of classes when the people in the

American Literature has always been about men and for men. In this essay, we are going to analyze the women’s role in the book, as inferior and weaker gender.

Beside the depiction of the negative impact of slavery and the sympathy toward these enslaved, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in some degree should be considered as the feminized literature work made by and for women, and highly praise womanhood. Influentially, this work portrays women as the center, especially women's moral strength and holiness. In this case, some people may disagree, as Miss Ophelia starts holding stereotypes to the black, and St. Clare’s wife Marie is pettily mean to others. It is true, but in the play most females are truly kind and warm hearted to others, often as more morally conscientious, committed, and even courageous than men. Through the narrative of the idealized womanhood, Harriet Beecher Stowe offers readers the ethical benchmarking of human behaviors. For instance, Eva is presented as an absolutely perfect imagery of womanhood in the play. She treats Uncle Tom equally as a friend rather the slave of her family, and her innocence also touches Topsy to start learning everything good.

   The nineteenth century proved to be a period of turmoil for women and the role they would play in an ever-changing America. Women contended with not only hard living in the domestic sphere, but were impacted by the undercurrent of slavery issues. The Anti-slavery movement and Women’s rights movement were bringing forth a new dimension of writers taking hard positions on these issues. Harriet Beecher Stowe became one of the country’s most well known writers who bridged these factions together with her famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her position was not from the perspective of women’s rights as much as the rights and freedom of slaves. Stowe appealed to the basis of Christian beliefs

As Mary Robinson clearly portrays through her poem, oppression is very common among the 1800s for women. Despite the controversial issue, majority of the population supports equal rights; every woman deserves the same opportunities any man is allowed. Moreover, the unjust treatment of women has been an ongoing conflict from the beginning of time, and Robinson clearly portrayed an example from the early ages through her poem. In The Poor Singing Dame, “He sent his bold yeomen with threats to prevent her (happiness)...At last, an old steward relentless he sent her-Who bore her, all trembling, to prison away!” (Mary Robinson 82). This clearly illustrates how women were oppressed around the eighteen-hundreds by a prince. This prince did not wish for any women or pheasant to be happy as long as he remained in power, thus he was retaining a lower class women’s happiness to fulfill his own pleasure. The selfish ruler was unable to handle this women’s joy and threw her into his prison letting her rot away. In the end, I believe this was unfair, as women deserve every right any man has to freedom and happiness.

Despite being a writer in a time period that saw women’s literature as insignificant, Susan Glaspell used her work to shed light on the trials of women and the popularizing idea of feminism. The male dominated society of the late nineteenth century bred an environment that oppressed and disrespected females. Traditional gender roles were deeply engrained in the culture, causing a lack of concern for any effects on women. Men regarded the actions of women and the issues of femininity with very little importance, hence the name of the work. With Trifles, Glaspell establishes that the conditions of patriarchy push women toward extreme emotional and psychological distress.

In Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, the author makes an imaginary realistic world based upon her perceptions of slavery in the southern states of The United States of America. Taking genuine events experienced by slaves and matching them with characters of her own creation, the author can form a piece that uncovered the shades of malice of servitude in the United States. In particular, Stowe emphatically builds up her female characters and their significance as mothers inside her novel with a specific goal to stress her argument. While the men inside her novel come to display the southern slavery tradition. Stowe looks to female ability to acknowledge the unfortunate reality of the practice. The legacy of Uncle Tom's Cabin from

Women have had to fight for their rights since 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, which was a time when women gathered in collaboration to go to war for their political rights. Although women are now granted the freedom to vote, work outside of the household, and even hold government positions, they still are held back by society every day. Two noble female poets, Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich, illustrate how women should live for their own kind of happiness. “Sadie and Maude” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “Snapshot of a Daughter-In-Law” by Adrienne Rich show readers that if women do what is “right” according to society we will not truly live a life of happiness. The poets illustrate the idea of women breaking outside of the norms and