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The early 20th century and the condition of women
Women and stereotypes
Women's liberation in the 1920s
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Recommended: The early 20th century and the condition of women
Separation between Love and Marriage in Mary the Wrongs of Woman, She Stoops to Conquer and Moll Flanders
Our aim in this paper will be to analyze and discuss the different ways in which love and marriage were dealt with during the eighteenth century and to what extent these two terms were linked together or considered as opposite. To accomplish this matter we are going to focus our attention on several works that are representative from this period and that reflect in an accurate way the social mores and more specifically, marriage conventions and romantic love. Throughout this discussion we will be emphasizing the idea that marriage is represented in these works as an institution completely detached from love and that it pursues more than anything else economic purposes and an rising in the social hierarchy.
First of all we should account for the situation of English women during the eighteenth century, that despite several social improvements, continued having less rights or freedom than men within the family and marriage as an institution. Patriarchal forms were still a deep-rooted custom that ruled society, which was male-centered. Marriage was often forced on women as their only way of having a recognized position in society, but at the same time led them to slavery. Women's property could be spent to the discretion of the husband as she was considered, together with all that she owned, a possession of the husband. Significantly relevant is the fact that the convention of marriages arranged by parents was still widely accepted.
Evidences of this aspect can be found in Goldsmith's work She Stoops to Conquer. At the very beginning of the play Mr.Hardcastle expresses that he has already chosen a husband for...
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...and stability. However, the existence of arranged marriages and consequently the lack of love, turned matrimony into a prison where women were locked. A male-ruled world transformed women into virtual slaves that had no rights, and the cases where marriage was the result of a true and passionate love can be counted for as exceptional.
Works Cited
Wollstonecraft, M., Mary The Wrongs of Woman, Oxford World's Classics. (1976)
Defoe, D., Moll Flanders (1978) Penguin English Classics. (1999)
Goldsmith, O., She Stoops to Conquer Dover Thrift Editions. (1991)
Stone, L. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, (1979)
Pelikan Ty, E. Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790's. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. (1993)
Spencer, J., The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen Oxford Press (1987)
To understand the significant change in the role of the women is to understand its roots. Traditionally, women in colonial America were limited in the roles they played or limited in their "spheres of influence." Women were once seen as only needed to bear children and care for them. Their only role was domestic; related to activities such as cooking and cleaning. A married woman shared her husband's status and often lived with his family. The woman was denied any legal control over her possession, land, money, or even her own children after a divorce. In a sense, she was the possession of her husband after marriage. She "... was a legal incompetent, as children, idiots, and criminals were under English law. As feme covert she was stripped of all property; once married, the clothes on her back, her personal possessions--whether valuable, mutable or merely sentimental--and even her body became her husband's, to direct, to manage, and to use. Once a child was born to the couple, her land, too, came under his control." (Berkin 14)
This time it was different than sandy creak because the United States Army had attacked Shoshones. The story was left untold for many years. This was until many monuments and events were thought to the people about the events. The United States Army literally punished the tribes for being in the way. They attacked with 300 military men. This proved tobe one of the bloodiest days that America would ever see. Especially for a Masacare. More than 300 hundred people were killed. These murders of theput upon Indian Shoshones tribes by the army proved to be brutal as they shot the children one by one, and even raped all of the helpless women of the tribe. The story puts out reasons as to why they attacked the tribe. This include the Leade Colonel Patricks thoughts that the natives, the Shoshones Bannock village, were being blamed for the attacking of people all along the Oregon Trail and todeaths of innocent Miners. Although the Oregon Trail was now said to be safe, still many ment were being taken down, and Colonel Patrick’s wanted to do something about it. As the action pursued many American’s didn’t take notice to the Massacre, due to the fact like they didn’t lik Native American’s. As time passed it wasn’t about good of the Massacre it was about the lives and culture of the people that lived there was destroyed or threatened. Their story still lives on today thanks to public historians in the area. This book shows the
Kort, Carol. A to Z of American Women Writers. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. Print.
Delany, Sheila. Writing Women: Women Writers and Women in Literature: Medieval to Modern. New York: Schocken, 1983.
On a personal note, in researching a paper on marriage and divorce a few semesters ago, I found that in the early Victorian era (1935-1901), a woman entering marriage had almost no rights. All her property automatically became her husband's. Even if she had her own land, her husband received the income from it. A husband had the right to lock up his wife. If he beat her, she had no legal redress. The law mostly removed itself from marital relations. Married women were put into the same category as lunatics, idiots, outlaws and children, and treated as such.
The problem we find in this story, and in puritanism, is that it presents contrasting views of love. Attachment to earthly possessions, to other people in fact, is discouraged, because everything physical leads to temptation and damnation, and ultimately hell, while the road to salvation of the individual wanders through a spiritual discipline, rigour, austerity. A man should not love his wife more than he loves God; in fact, it is recommended that he not derive pleasure from his wife, but rather seek suffering, in order to redeem himself from his earthly condition, his impure state.
During the Victorian Age, 1830-1901, society had firm opinions on how they believed women should behave. The opinions, however, changed and varied a great deal over the span of the 71 years that made up the Victorian period. Towards the beginning of that era women were seen as the fairer sex, and the majority of their early lives were spent preparing for marriage. Over the course of the Victorian era, however, society made many different social, political, and economic changes, as well as witnessed the creation of many new gadgets. As society evolved throughout the Victorian era to be more advanced, it also became more aware of the need to treat women as equals in regards to rights, jobs, pastimes, and opinions. An example of inequality that women faced during that time was when men would keep up the appearance of being in a loving family, meanwhile they would be cheating on their wives and betraying their families (Frost 196). As Horrible as husbands cheating on their wives was, that was not what was seen as the issue at that time. The part of cheating during that era that bugged society was that if a woman committed the same trespass and was unfaithful in a marriage she would be publicly shamed (Frost 196). It is because of this injustice to women, and the many other examples of inequality that they faced that during the Victorian era, that the English wished to reform marriage. They felt that the structure of marriage was unfair to the females involved. By the end of the era, there had been a significant amount of ground laid towards female equality. The literary works The Lady of Shalott and The Goblin Market address and respond to the conflicts and roles of women as they changed over the course of the Victorian era. Both p...
“Love and Marriage.” Life in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan.org, 25 March 2008. Web. 3 March 2014.
Throughout the epic poem, Beowulf shows his love for glory by fighting for his kingdom. Beowulf was Geatland’s greatest warrior which means that he was always thirsty for a battle. So once Geatland found out that Denmark was being terrorized by Grendel, Beowulf was the first to help. One of the first ways the epic shows this trait of a love of glory is after the
Crick, N. R., & Grotpeter, J. K. (1995). Relational aggression, gender, and social-psychological adjustment. Child Development, 66, 710–722.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.
As aggression in the media increases, studies examining its effects on human behavior do as well. It is widely accepted that physical aggression is characterized by physical violence. On the other hand, social aggression is characterized by both verbal and nonverbal actions typically ranging from gossip and rumors to ignoring peers. While a plethora of studies have focused on physical aggression, there are some that indicate pertinent information relating to social aggression. One study conducted by Crick, Bigbee, and Howes, indicates that there is a higher prevalence of social aggression among females than males, while another conducted by Coyne and Archer found 92% of programs popular among adolescents aged 11-14 contained acts of social
... data (Myers, 2013). To illustrate the application of grounded theory to the tourism and hospitality industry in this article, the two dimensional framework proposed Urquhart, Lehman and Myers (2010) is depicted in Figure 4. Connell and Lowe (1997) demonstrate interpretation on the degree of conceptualization on the x-axis and substantive focus of the theory scope on the y-axis (Myers, 2013). The article notes that data collection interview and fieldwork produced 40,000 words of data and sufficient evidence (Connell and Lowe, 1997), but the article does not show any of the data (Pratt, 2009). As a result, it is not clear how the researcher connects the data to the practical application of the approach in international tourism and hospitality industry. The article does explain the motive and need (Pratt, 2009) for inductive qualitative research using grounded theory.
In life women had only one main goal; to marry. Prior to a woman’s marriage, a woman would learn the basic necessities and qualities of a typical Victorian Woman. She would learn ideals such as cooking, cleaning, weaving, raising children and plenty more. If a woman was well of in the financial aspects, she likely did not have to learn much or work as hard other women due to having maids at hand. Women at the time were typically unable to better educate themselves beyond minimal knowledge of household duties because in essence men ruled society. “A woman was inferior to a mam in all ways except the unique one that counted most [to a man]: her femininity. Her place was in the home, on a veritable pedestal if one could be afforded, and emphatically not in the world of affairs” (Altick, 54).
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is written in an entertaining and adventurous spirit, but serves a higher purpose by illustrating the century’s view of courtly love. Hundreds, if not thousands, of other pieces of literature written in the same century prevail to commemorate the coupling of breathtaking princesses with lionhearted knights after going through unimaginable adventures, but only a slight few examine the viability of such courtly love and the related dilemmas that always succeed. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows that women desire most their husband’s love, Overall, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows that the meaning of true love does not stay consistent, whether between singular or separate communities and remains timeless as the depictions of love from this 14th century tale still hold true today.