The Female Entrepreneurial Role in James M Cain's Mildred Pierce
A woman's place in the post-depression era is usually one where a woman would commonly be known to have a role in the economy; only to be waiting in her kitchen to cook for the "money-making husband." It was often rare to encounter one woman who had the ability to take her inner interests and turn them into an entrepreneurial role in society. Yet, through this novel by James M. Cain, one will encounter Mildred Pierce, in which Mildred uses her inner talent, and cooking. To redeem the long lost woman's role in the economy and the workforce. This inner interest of cooking was not kept inside the household as it has with millions of other woman in the United States; it was instead expanded into a successful capitalistic venture for Mildred.
Gorgeous legs, great cook, and friendly disposition. Mildred used these attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. Yet Mildred also had a weakness, one being that she has failed to Veda’s standards. Mildred Pierce tries her best in order to please her daughter. She charts the rise and fall of a woman who makes and markets pies. When her husband loses his livelihood as a result of the Wall Street crash, Mildred takes work "as a waitress"(Mildred Pierce) in a diner. "Recognizing that she can produce better pies than the business currently has to offer, she rapidly becomes its supplier."(1,dirks) Then she opens a restaurant of her own, which leads to openings of several others. Mildred, a mother of two daughters, was left alone because of her husband, Bert. Mildred, capable of cooking meals as to a fancy restaurant she decides to utilize these techniques in opening her Own restaurant. Wally, a friend of Mildred's husband helps in organizing a place to build the new restaurant." For the first time in her life, Mildred felt the quick excitement of a conspiratorial deal. She comprehended the credit aspect of it, once Wally explained it, and she didn't need to be told how perfect the place was for her purposes."(93,Cain) Mildred able to use the abandon Pierce Model home she renovates, and turns it into a restaurant. She decided on a name, "Mildred Pierce" in which she only serves chicken and waffles and pies on the side.
The literature of the nineteenth century cataloged the social, economical and political changes during its period. Through it many new concerns and ideologies were proposed and made their journeys through intellectual spheres that have endured and kept their relevance in our own period today. The literature, sometimes quite overtly, introduced the issues arising with the changes in society specifically due to the industrial revolution. In this mixture of new ideas was the question of women's labor and functions among this rapidly changing society. American authors as well as Victorian authors, like George Gissing and Mabel Wotton, explored these issues somewhat explicitly during this period. In America, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed these issues in short stories with strong implications of the dangers of unfulfilled or unsatisfying labor available to women.
Kerber uses research from legal records, diaries, memoirs, and letters to demonstrate how the war affected the lives of women and the new responsibilities that fell to them as a result. When the American Revolution began, men and women did not know what role women would play. It was certainly evident that someone would have to tend the farms and run the men’s property. No man would want to leave their estate without knowing it would be taken care of, leaving women to become leaders on the home front. Men left their property with the ...
The author shows the reader the sea just as the sailor does as death, but more than death
Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain, begins in pre-Depression California, and ends during World War II times, also in California. The main character, Mildred Pierce, is a very attractive housewife of 29, raising two daughters, Ray and Veda. Although Mildred loves both her daughters, Veda is a particular obsession with Mildred. She constantly slaves away throughout the novel to do whatever she can to make Veda happy, despite the constant abuse and deception Veda inflicts upon Mildred. After a divorce from her first husband, Bert, in the opening pages of the novel, Mildred is forced to sacrifice her pride and become a waitress in order to support her family. If Veda were ever to find out, she would be appalled; a constantly recurring theme throughout this story is Veda’s pride and arrogance, and her condemnation of jobs she deems to be menial. Mildred’s main goal is to nurture Veda’s musical talents, and manages to pay for expensive music lessons from her meager salaries as a waitress and pie baker. However, Mildred’s luck is soon to change, as she takes up with an attorney and former partner of Bert, Wally. Mildred is able to use Wally’s business and real estate savvy to build a restaurant out of a deserted model home, and from there create a thriving chain of three food businesses. After becoming bored with Wally, however, Mildred craves a relationship with another man, a prestigious local man named Monty. Veda highly approves of her mother’s choice, as this makes her feel as if she too were more prestigious and affluent, despite having misgivings about her mother still being so low as to have an average, pedestrian job. All seems to be going well; even through Veda’s constant demands and tantrums, she still gets everything she wants, and Mildred and Monty are happy. Monty, however, falls on hard times with the coming of the Great Depression, and he constantly mooches off of Mildred’s affluence, making it a struggle for Mildred to cater to Veda’s every whim. Mildred soon dumps Monty to focus on making Veda a musical prodigy; this fails, however, when Veda is told that her piano is not up to par from a local famous music teacher. After Veda recovers from this shock, she explores the opportunities offered by an acting career, and begins to spin more webs of deception and selfishness. After Veda forces money out of a local rich family, lying and claiming their son got her pregnant, Mildred and Veda have a major argument, and Veda disowns her mother.
“Deborah Sampson, the daughter of a poor Massachusetts farmer, disguised herself as a man and in 1782, at age twenty-one, enlisted in the Continental army. Ultimately, her commanding officer discovered her secret but kept it to himself, and she was honorably discharged at the end of the war.” She was one of the few women who fought in the Revolution. This example pictured the figure of women fighting alongside men. This encouraged the expansion of wife’s opportunities. Deborah, after the Revolution along with other known female figures, reinforced the ideology of Republican Motherhood which saw the marriage as a “voluntary union held together by affection and mutual dependency rather than male authority.” (Foner, p. 190). This ideal of “companionate” marriage changed the structure of the whole family itself, the now called Modern Family in which workers, laborers and domestic servants are now not considered member of the family anymore. However even if women thought that after the war they would have been seen from the society in a different way it never happened. The revolution haven’t changed the perception of the woman and the emancipated ideal
As many women took on a domestic role during this era, by the turn of the century women were certainly not strangers to the work force. As the developing American nation altered the lives of its citizens, both men and women found themselves struggling economically and migrated into cities to find work in the emerging industrialized labor movement . Ho...
“The Pastoralization of Housework” by Jeanne Boydston is a publication that demonstrates women’s roles during the antebellum period. Women during this period began to embrace housework and believed their responsibilities were to maintain the home, and produce contented and healthy families. As things progressed, housework no longer held monetary value, and as a result, womanhood slowly shifted from worker to nurturer. The roles that women once held in the household were slowly diminishing as the economy became more industrialized. Despite the discomfort of men, when women realized they could find decent employment, still maintain their household and have extra income, women began exploring their option.
...ues women’s work becomes wrong. Yes, in today’s society one could argue further that a woman who stays at home and does not work is only reinforcing the stereotype and prolonging the inequality. However, this essay was not written to change the world. It simply strove to identify and prove the reasons behind a ruined sense of self worth that many women in the early 1900’s felt as a result of their work being demeaned. By reaching out to people’s emotional sides, McBride relayed her grandmother’s tale so that people could clearly feel the hurt and demotion that women of that time lived with in order to have them persuaded that the oppression of women in any manner and capacity is wrong.
In this study, another relationship between parenting styles and child development is presented. Participants were 7,836 adolescents enrolled in six high schools in San Francisco. They were provided with a questionnaire that included student background information, self-reported grades, parental attitudes and behaviors, and family commutation information. The study included three parenting styles, which were authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. Each one of the styles were described in the students’ questionnaire. The authoritarian style included the idea that as a response to a bad grade, parents tend to get upset, and when good grades are achieved, parents tell the student to do even better than what they have done. On the other hand, permissive parenting style was described as parents no caring about the students’ grade, and that hard work in school is not important for them. Then, they included authoritative parenting style as supportive parents that praise the student when good grades are achieved and more freedom to make decisions is given, but when poor grades are obtained, freedom is taken away and students are encouraged to try harder and some source of help is
Therefore, finding the most efficient and accurate way of doing so is worthy of discussion. Though Aunola and Nurmi claim that children are incapable of effectively measuring their parent’s tendencies and behaviors, a study done by Judith Smetana says otherwise. In “Parenting Styles and Conceptions of Parental Authority during Adolescence,” Smetana compares and contrasts the ways in which adolescents and their parents view their parenting styles. Smetana notes that “...little research has compared parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of parenting styles.” In making this comment, Smetana implies that her study will help explain differences in their perceptions. Understanding these differences will allow researchers to better analyze studies that use different methods in attaining their data (parent reports or adolescent reports). Because the results of this study showed that adolescents often times viewed their parents as either more authoritarian or permissive, these viewpoints may directly affect the study done by Aunola and Nurmi as their claims are based on the reports of parenting styles done by parents alone. If they were to also gather the perceptions of the children involved in the study, they might be able to have a more well-rounded understanding of how different parenting styles relate to problem behaviors, or they could reduce the discrepancies among different
Meyer, Sandra L. "Brief Review: 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'" Student Pluse. N.p., 2010. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. . Fourth
Drug policy is a crucial topic in the country today. Substance abuse, as well as drug-related crime rates, are a huge problem. This is a fact. The way to fix the problem of substance abuse, however, is widely disagreed upon. Some think that stricter laws regarding drug possession and use would solve the problem, while others believe that loosening the restrictions would be a better option. The issue of legalizing drugs, especially marijuana, is one that is debated all the time. In fact, in 1995, a survey was conducted on the most important policy issues and eighty five percent of the country placed drugs at the top of the list (Falco 1996). Many states are actually beginning to decriminalize, and even legalize, marijuana use for medical perposes. In fact, two states, Washington and Colorado, have legalized the recreational use of marijuana for anybody over the age of twenty-one since 2012. (Hawken, Caulkins, Kilmer, and Kleiman 2013)
... a feme covert, a dependant. Jeanne Boydston paints a wholly different picture of Eighteenth Century America and women’s involvement in the burgeoning labor market. In The Woman Who Wasn't There: Women's Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States Boydston points to the emphasis on household productivity in order to deal with an erratic economy. She tells us that by the mid-eighteenth century the flexible nature of “woman’s work” (which could be done at home, with tools that were readily available) gave rise to the role of wife as “deputy husband”. Though soon the growing linkage between what Boydston calls “independent manhood” and “economic agency” began to overwhelm. There was a reordering of the concept of gender in late eighteenth century America, and the concept of separate spheres that Linda Kerber eloquently debunks began to take hold.
George Orwell is heavily renowned as one of the most influential writers to have lived during the 20th Century. Born in 1903, Orwell grew up through two World Wars and fought in the Spanish Civil war. This led him to develop his own strong political beliefs and views about events that were occurring during his lifetime. Orwell incorporates these views in his writing by making specific comments against totalitarianism and other left wing ideologies in his work. Orwell’s essays will continue to be worthy of critical study as they transcend the time in which they were written and discuss concerns which still remain relevant to universal readers today as well as continuing to challenge readers’ perspectives. Orwell skillfully fuses artistic qualities and intellectual qualities through the abundance of language techniques such as the use of his conversational tone, concrete imagery as well as his heavy use of rhetoric to enable him to effectively highlight his concerns and engage the mind of the reader. Through their coherent use of form, language and ability to remain a whole, Orwell’s essays will continue to be worthy of critical study.
Darling and Steinberg (1993) have defined parenting styles as “a constellation of attitudes toward the child that are communicated to the child and that taken together, create an emotional climate in which the parent’s behaviors are expressed” (p. 488). In order to fully understand how these parenting practice influence behaviors and habits on academic performance or achievement you must understand the differences between the practices. In a more concise explanation, authoritarian practices are parents who are extremely strict, admire obedience, and discourage communication between the parent-child and express low levels of warmth. Authoritative practices are parents who have rules and boundaries, open communication between themselves and the child and have an equal balance of warmth for the child. Permissive practices are parents who are warm and loving, however have no rules and boundaries, in other words, these parent have no limits or expectations for their child. Uninvolved-neglecting practices are those parents who do not impose discipline or encouragement, these parents do not engage with their child. With these definitions in mind a parent can be any one or a mixture of