The Bluest Eye Sexism

Women have been viewed as the weaker sex since the beginning of time and have continuously been pushed down in society. Sexism is still a prominent issue in everyday life, because even though public sexism is less visible, sexist opinions still remain in the minds of many. Women have always been viewed as caretakers of the household and as mere objects of lust, being toted around as accessories to men. For reproductive purposes only, women were necessary. They were never viewed as individual human beings, therefore, it took far too long for women to gain the rights they naturally deserve. In more recent history, sexist officials have been elected into our offices and are soon going to continue to discriminate against women and other minority

In the novel, Pecola is abused and raped by her father and is later impregnated with his child. This is an issue that explains perfectly why abortion needs to remain an option for women. The reader learns right away of Pecola’s situation, but the story moves backwards in explaining how each character has been emotionally and physically traumatized and how some events in their lives may have damaged their ability to act morally. The story is mostly told from the point of view of a young girl, Claudia, and this helps illustrate how little information young girls know about the consequences of sexual abuse. There is a moment in the story in which Claudia expresses jealousy towards her sister, Frieda, after she has been sexually “picked at” by a grown man. She is unable to understand why Frieda didn’t enjoy him touching her, because she has only heard about how being touched sexually is supposed to feel pleasurable (Morrison 99). Women are pushed around in sexual contexts, as well as social ones, and the male characters in the novel express feelings of dominance over the female characters constantly. A woman in the novel even explains that a man in town has left another woman due to her being too masculine. She gossips, “Said he wanted a woman to smell like a woman”(Morrison 13), and this is the base of the issue of all

At early points in history, an unmarried woman would be forced to give up her child (Leslie 38). In Leslie Victoria’s article, “Fallen Women”, she describes The Foundling Hospital, which was established to provide for kids whose mothers could not care for them. Why not allow women to make the choice whether or not to bring a neglected child into this world in the first place? Admissions eventually relied on whether or not a woman was married, and that would determine whether or not their child would be provided for (Leslie 40). Leslie goes on to write about how the lives of these children were entirely in the hands of the male hospital committee, as they judged each woman’s character. There are some women who are not cut out to be mothers, and some of the factors working against them are not their fault. No one should be expected to care for another living person before themselves unless they are ready financially, and emotionally to take on that task. Of course, Pecola, a young girl, is not. So if a child like Pecola happens to be pregnant with a living thing that they cannot practically care for, they need to have the choice to abort if necessary. It would be much better to take the life of an unborn fetus, than it would to allow that child to enter the world and then be faced with problems like starvation or financial instability all because the mother was