The Role Of Women In Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

This generation of women, may it be young or old, are fortunate to live in a country where you can be anything, do anything, and say anything that men can. Although in theory the playing fields are still not completely even, we as a nation have made some substantial progress in women’s rights. Just a few hundred years ago, women livered mundane lives and rarely got to speak up for themselves. In the book, The Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, it follows the life of Martha Ballard through the use of her own diary. Martha Ballard captures the lives of common women in the Early Republic Era by providing an authentic record of the role women played in their communities throughout the developmental years of the United States.

In Octavia Butler’s Dawn the idea of gender is deconstructed and reformed from the typical human’s definition. Often people do not consider the role of gender in society today. Usually the first thing one notices when meeting someone new is their gender or their presumed gender. However, there becomes a problem when the person whose gender we perceived identifies as a different gender. Butler forces the reader to examine how they judge and perceive gender. While the ooloi are actually “its” their personalities seem to imply a certain gender. The transgender community often brings up this issue because these assumptions of gender based on our judgments of what defines a male and what defines a female can skew how a transgender person is treated and addressed. In Chapter One of Gender Through the Prism of Difference by Anne Fausto-Sterling, the idea of expanding the number of genders based on one’s biological differences is examined through the five sexes theory. By now the concept of gender being defined solely by one’s biology has mostly been left in the past but the question remains of how do we truly define gender? How does being outside of the social norms that Michael Warner talks about cause us to feel shame when discussing our gender and our perceptions of gender? In this essay, I will argue that preconceived notions of gender create shame when a person’s own perception of their gender does not fit the social norms. This stigma around the limited and strict definitions

Octavia Butler's short story “Bloodchild,” reinvents normative ideas of gender, power, and reproduction to demonstrate the discrepancies created by the aforementioned constructed ideals in society, both fictional and otherwise. Through the idea of embracing one’s differences Butler also builds the notion that the “Other,” in the short story is not simple because she assigns humanity to both the Tlics and Terrans creating a gray area for who is viewed as “Other,” which tells us that Butler’s idea of other is non-existent rather she focuses on accepting diversity of thought and appearance.

For the most part, society’s conception of women in the 19th century dictated the way women were treated and influenced the portrayal of female characters in writing generated during that time. The Cult of Domesticity claimed that true womanhood was marked by a natural inclination to domesticity and submissiveness. Though all women clearly have the capacity to think for themselves, earn money, and overcome the emotional obstacles they may meet, the plausibility of complete independence was a challenging appeal for Harper to make. Men dominated family

Towards the end of the 1800s and into the beginning of the 1900s, the roles of women in society and in the family began to change drastically compared to what it had been in the past. Women were now allowed to own land, vote, and do more than cook and clean. Willa Cather and William Faulkner portray the roles of women in the early 1900s in their short stories, “Neighbor Rosicky” and “A Rose for Emily.” These short stories were both published around the year 1930. Because of what was happening in the US at the time, these stories are very good examples of the ways women were treated at this time.

In Kindred, by Olivia Butler a main character name Dana traveled back in time where she battled the face of inequalities. Danas journey back to the past is to help the readers understand what African-Americans had to experience and what they had to go through as a slave to be a free person. There was a lack of human rights for blacks, blacks were vulnerability with sexual assault and rape. Dana had dealt with her own experiences has being a slave with discrimination from Rufus, rape, racism, and abuse. She had self taught herself about slavery which gave her knowledge to prepare herself for what she had coming.

The balance of power has been one of mankind’s most prominent and fought-over issues, particularly among the two sexes. Men are biologically predisposed to be more powerful, and humans have historically associated a male’s physical strength with authority. At the same time, women have been conditioned to yield to a man’s power, and have been taught that men are meant to hold economic, societal, and domestic control, as displayed by New York’s high-society in Edith Wharton’s timeless novel The Age of Innocence. Yet, power is an unquantifiable, metaphysical idea completely unrelated to one’s gender. Power is held in the eye of the beholder, and over time, women have used this idea to manipulate and control men without them even knowing. In doing so, women have been creating their own power for centuries, though society does not recognize it nor give them credit for having as much control as they do. Despite its setting in a patriarchal 19th century society, Wharton manages to defy even modern gender roles by contrasting the influence of resolute Ellen Olenska—a presumably promiscuous noblewoman—with lawyer Newland Archer’s submissiveness so as to suggest that women truly hold power over men during this time.

An initial reading of A Jury of Her Peers suggests that the author focuses on the common stereotypes of women in the 1800s; however, a close reading reveals that the text also examines the idea that they are more capable than men may think. The fact that Mrs. Wright was able to pull off killing her husband by herself and without the men finding out proves that she is very capable and did not need the help of men to pull it off. The men at the time believed that women were incapable of doing things by themselves and thought that they should just stay in the kitchen, cook, and clean. They thought that they could not manage to do things that men could and did not trust them with a man's job.

The Book of Martha by Octavia Butler portrays a black woman, Martha, who is affected by society. God visits Martha and gives her a task to help save humankind from their destructive ways. Throughout the short story, Martha struggles to help find a solution that will be less disastrous and through this, she discovers more about herself. The book opens with God saying, "You're truly free for the first time", showing that Martha was free from society's input, barriers, and judging eyes. Society is the source of Gods transformations, how race, class, and gender.

She writes how the housewives also served as " helpmates" to the men. If for any reason the men were injured and could not perform in the Revolutionary War, these women were expected to "step into their husbands' shoes" and "fulfill their obligations as helpmates" when needed to (11). That brought out the physical strength, courage, mental toughness in the women as they were "performing male duties, exhibiting masculine traits" (11). Through all this the "gender lines remained intact" and women were still considered smaller than the

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.

In the 1800’s, the women responsibilities were to maintain order in the house, protect and discipline the students. In the 21st century, now women are not just responsible for cleaning, cooking and discipling children, instead women can now work and impose some of those tasks on their husbands. In the story “Our Deportment, or the Manners, Conduct, and Dress of Refined Society”, as the home is considered the “woman’s kingdom” and that it is the women responsibility to “make the lives of her husband and the dear ones committed to her trust, is the honored task which it is the wife’s province” (Gutenberg 1), most of their time is spent in the home making sure the home is kept under control and ready to serve her husbands and children. In reference to the speech by Emma Watson, she states that “we need to end gender inequality” (Watson 1), which in the 21st century it is coming closer to reality. Women now don’t have to remain at home all day, they can now work just like men and provide for their families the same way men do.

Throughout the 1800’s the prototype for women was housewife and caregiver. Women that lived in the 1800’s did not have careers and were merely counterparts of their husbands. This female stereotype has been demonstrated throughout the literature

Many women have experienced discrimination due to their gender. Society views women as inferior beings that cannot achieve greatness. Furthermore, women have acquired a set of rules and expectations to meet within their role in society. In the 1850 romance novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts the beauty and strength of women. Despite society’s strict views of gender roles, women can convert society’s oppression into freedom due to the qualities they possess, which surpass society’s assumed capabilities of them.

A woman’s power and privileges depend on which societal class she is in. In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale each group of women are each represented in a different way. The three classes of women from the novel are the Handmaids, the Marthas and the Wives. The ways in which the women are portrayed reflect their societal power and their privileges that they bestow.