Oppression Of Women In Pride And Prejudice By Jane Austen

On the outside, most would see Jane Austen as just another boring author of another boring book; however, Jane Austen is so much more than that. Austen saw the flaws in society and used her writing as a platform for social reform. By showcasing the oppression women throughout Pride and Prejudice, Austen was able to make people realize the problem with patriarchy and promote change. Throughout Pride and Prejudice women are unequally treated because they live in a patriarchal society. Women are unable to inherit wealth, own property, and are seen as a burden to their family. All of this makes women financially dependent on men, so if they never marry they will have little to no means to support themselves. Patriarchy psychologically manipulates

Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice to magnify the oppression of women, and to show the world how oblivious everyone was to the problem. Austen’s use of satire when she says that it is a “truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” shows that she plans on using this novel to break society’s norms (Austen 1). Austen wants people to realize how ridiculous this truth is, so they do something in order to change it. Pride and Prejudice is presumably a novel about love and romance; however, it is actually about the underlying oppression of women in society. Austen wanted to point out that society prized a man’s wants over woman’s freedom, and ridicule how greatly society values marriage. Unlike most of the women in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen never got married and spent majority of her life focusing on career goals. Austen uses her personal life to show women that they do not need a man to be successful; if Austen focused on marriage instead of her career, she would not be the well-known author she is today. There will always be inequality between genders, but by not being oblivious to what is happening women can demand the rights that they deserve. Austen exposed that years of oppression can psychologically make a woman devalue herself throughout Pride and Prejudice. Inspiring women to push for equality is ultimately what is “linking Jane Austen with the feminist tradition of revolt in the eighteenth century” (Brown 324). Austen was a pioneer who paved the way for future women to demand gender equality. Jane Austen’s works has inspired women to begin to chip down the walls of patriarchy, and end the time when all a woman had to offer the world was her hand in