preview

The Power Of Women In Kate Chopin's A Respectable Woman

Decent Essays
Open Document

The Power of Women
Before women started fighting for their rights in the mid nineteenth-century, women were powerless and unequal to men. Women have fought to have the rights that they have today, before the nineteenth-century women had no rights. However, this changed when women decided to unify and fight for their rights.They were deprived of many things; for example, the right to suffrage, gender pay gap, and access to higher education but these are not all the battles that women wanted to fight. Women debated that all these rights were necessary in order to achieve equality to men. Through the powerful words of Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a Woman”, we can see that women were not treated as equals to men. Also in Chopin’s “A …show more content…

Susan B. Anthony was best known for fighting for fighting for voting rights, “she had brought her copy of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which guaranteed the right of citizens to vote. She had also brought a copy of the New York State Constitution” (Pollack 9-10). However, she ended up being jailed three weeks after she voted, because men interpreted the fourteenth amendment as only male citizens could vote and women had no right to vote. Susan was ready to fight no matter how hard the fight would be she was ready to take it on. Women won the right to vote in 1868 when the fourteenth amendment was ratified; however, it was officially won with the nineteenth amendment. It states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” (Ginsberg, et al, A27), this was proposed in 1919 and ratified in 1920.
Women were not only deprived the right to vote they also had a wider pay gap and this was based gender, this is called the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap is the difference in pay between men and women. In “Ain’t I a Woman” Truth emphasizes how women deserve to be treated the same as men. In 1869, “many of these women are now performing the same grade of work at $900 per annum for which men receive $1800. Most of them, too, have families to support; being nearly all either widow or orphans made by the war” (Alter);

Get Access