Women have been thought of as inferior to men for years. Woolf brings up and proves this point in her book A Room of One's Own. Although she proves the point that men have always treated women as inferior she is quick not to blame men, saying that they have only done it to promote their own superiority. The lack of acknowledgement given to women by men has always held women back for years and A Room of One's Own and The Awakening not only acknowledge this but also bring up this point in order to show it to society and their audiances.
In The Awakening Kate Chopin writes to her audiance to make them realize how women were being treated and that it was becoming an issue. She brings up the issue that women are treated as inferior and were not able to do anything without the presence of a man. She shows this point by writing that Edna wishes to express herself on her own as an individual. Edna becomes overwhelmed that her husband and the society she lived in thinks that she is acting and thinking obscurley. She is not able to handle the inferiority that she is treated with so she ends up killing herself. In A Room of One's Own Woolf makes up an imaginary sister to Shakespeare and writes what she thought would have been the life of a women like her. In the end she commits suicide becuase she was not given the oppurtunity to express her own genius becuase she was a woman. These two plots are parrallel because both women were not given the oppurtunities to succeed in their own lives because of their gender. In both circumstances the writers create this kind of storyline to express to the audiance or possibly to make the audiance understand how women were being treated and that it was real what they were saying and in both circumstances I believe that each author wanted to stir up feelings of the readers or audiances to get them thinking about this topic.
Women have come along way from the societies in both A Room of One's Own and The Awakening, but they are still treated as somewhat inferior in our own society. In some jobs women are not paid as much, women are not even hired in some jobs because some think that the job is to difficult for a woman, and woman are still stereotypically supposed to stay home with the children and take care of the house. Mostly today though women are going out and getting educated to support themselves and their families. In today's society women are given the same opurtunities to educate themselves.
In my opinion the women who are still staying home and not educating themselves or getting jobs in order to support themselves are the ones that are making it harder for women to completely become the "unprotected sex" that Woolf expresses in her book. They are keeping the stereotype going that we, women, SHOULD stay home to work with the children and the house. If all women, as we are slowly becoming, go out and get jobs that can support themselves then women, as a gender, will cease to be linked with the idea that women need to be provided for or that we need someone, a man specifically, to depend or rely on.
Good.
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