"When We Dead Awaken" by Adrienne Rich

All three passages, Clark Benson’s "The Case Against Women’s Suffrage", Alice Duer Miller’s "Are Women People?", and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping”, revolve around the social matter of women’s rights. However, each literary work portrays a different perspective on the issue. Indeed, between the mid-1800s and the late 1900s, societal imbalance was a significant U.S. controversy, in which diverse literary authors addressed their support or opposition towards women’s rights. Indubitably, the individual authors of the three passages possess disparate views, each asserting their assessment of the social debate.

Every writer has a story to tell. No matter gender, religion, or any other classification they all share equal importance. When readers overlook those things, they find great pieces of literature such as Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes. Unbiased readers get to experience the tragic story of Mary’s life in captivity alongside the revelations of Native American stereotypes and Judith’s take on the unfair world of being an educated woman in America. Although they are talking about two different topics they both share the similar conclusion that Americas identity revolves around using stereotypes to defend against anything greater

Talcott Parsons’s sex role theory was based and structured according to a more traditional family structure in that the man was the work-oriented contributor (breadwinners) and the women was the domestically oriented partner (housewives) of the man ensuring the home, children and day to day household functions were tended to. In retrospect this structure was seen to produce future laborers who became contributing members of society which is all part of a capitalist system (Conley, 2013).

In the words of Jane Austen, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Austen, 5). This quote highlights how women were dependent on men to have a place and to be respected in society at the time of the victorian era. Women were viewed as domestic tools rather than human beings; they were treated as a domestic production that men control and own. Before a woman is married she is owned by her father, and after she is owned by her husband. In different parts of the world, the undergrading of women or no feminism still exists. Women can not voice their opinions let alone own an object 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.

While Tannen and Vendituoli both argue that women experience more prejudice than men throughout their lives, St. John exploits the stereotypes society places on women daily and contests them. Even though Tannen’s essay is the most logical and convincing, all three authors have interesting evidence. Throughout her essay, Tannen makes it clear to the reader that a woman being viewed as marked is illogical. She did so by continuously revealing assumptions that each fell under specific situations. She leaves the reader by feeling defeated, because she knows what is wrong but can do nothing to change it. While Vendituoli’s essay was less effective than Tannen, her mixture of tweets, and people’s opinions around the country were appealing,

Women in the past have been placed at home to care for the children, but times have changed. The education of women has grown incredibly since the 1970’s. Females who enter into the workforce have gone through the exact same training as men, but yet they are still paid less. In Kevin Miller’s essay, “The Simple Truth about the Gender

Slaughter (2012) claims that people, especially women suffer in reaching their desired equilibrium of an adequate work-life balance. She proclaims that women are defeated individuals if they cannot seem to manage a family and a high paying job at the same time, like men do (Slaughter, 2012). Society seeks women in powerful positions to be role models for the next generation who seems less ambitious than their successors (Slaughter, 2012).

Adrienne Richs poetry envisions alternatives for change; aiming to make voices that were once hidden and marginalised become able to express themselves by being given the power of speech in a culture of revolutionising freedom and courage. Rich’s representation of humanity, and the patriarchal society which controls human beings, condemns the way in which women are constrained and restricted by males in an exclusively masculine culture.

In today’s society, the head of the household is not decided via gender but more so by money. In Stephen Marche’s article, “Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life Balance and Income Equality,” he argues that in heterosexual relationships the central conflict is not men verses women, nor is it “mother verses father” but rather “family verses money.” He states that “decisions about who works and who takes care of the children, and who makes the money and how the money is spent, are not decided by women alone or by some vague and impersonal force called society” (Marche). Marche also implies that even though today’s society may look like a patriarchy, it is but a false facade created by those who campaign for egalitarianism. He believes that the feminist movements, being dominated mainly by middle-class women, does not represent the majority, and that their push for more woman in leadership positions will

Throughout the 1950s, educated middle class women heard the traditional housewife advice such as the first priority should be to take care of the husband and children, from the time they were born. Until those women finally reached their already planned adulthood. Although not all women wanted to wear the same pearls and bring a husband a pipe and slippers upon arriving home after work. In 1963, Betty Friedan published a book called , “The Feminine Mystique” that distinguished the problem with the traditional role that has no name. Among all the demands to prepare breakfast, drive children to their activities, or to prepare entertainment for guests, Friedan questioned, Is this all there is? Is this really all, a woman is capable of doing. The problem is many women were not fond of the idea of playing a traditional role society had already prescribed for them. Women also demanded equal pay for equal work as well as pressuring the government into supporting and enforcing a legislation that will prohibit any gender discrimination (ushistory). Betty

(furze) Stereotypes are so ingrained into our social environment that often they aren’t seen as stereotypes but as ‘the way things are’. (lips) Society shapes men to believe within the family unit, they must be the ‘bread winner’ and provide financial and economically support for the family while the woman do domestic housework and care for any children. Connell refers to this as production relations; the division of labour allocated to men and women based on their gender roles. While society is becoming more accepting of men who choose to stay become stay-at-home dads, it is not yet a commonly seen practise. Males often seek high status careers such as architects, doctors and engineers to exert their masculinity. Personally, I come from a traditional nuclear family where my mother stayed at home and cared for my siblings and I, and my father went out to work and support the family. I feel if I had grown up as a male, my father would be influential and inspiring role model. Drawing from family influence and Connell’s construction of production relations, as a male I would feel obligated by society to work and financially support my family just as my father had

Men are the breadwinners, while women domestically chained as “Mother says…I cannot do housework unless I do it in my own house”. This speaks to the notion that women were envisioned to be limited to a maternal and private sphere.

Adrienne Rich, via Of Woman Born, has created a wonderfully complex description and analysis of the condition of being a woman in our patriarchal American culture, or at least in the middle-class, white portion of it, as she acknowledges in the introduction to the 1986 edition of the book. Since I happen to fit into this category, I find this book to be very personally satisfying, although I can certainly imagine that Rich's writings wouldn't be completely applicable to all women in America. Rich examines the various issues surrounding multiple aspects of being a woman -- motherhood, relations with men, relations with children, relations with the patriarchy at large, etc. -- with a

By shunning the male control of her money mandated within marriage, Roxana calls into question not only the broad contours of patriarchal control over women embodied in […] the ‘sexual contract,’ but also the more specific model of middle-class marriage, in which men's position as exclusive breadwinner increasingly limited women's productive economic role. Roxana […] is vexed by the failure of a system, namely marriage, which is ostensibly designed to safeguard, rather than destroy, the interests of women and children (Maurer, 364).