I Didn?t Know My Dad Was A Writer

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Recommended: Gender roles in Literature

I Didn’t Know My Dad was a Writer

It came as a complete shock to me when I read an essay that looked as if it was taken straight from my father’s mouth. My father and the author could have been neighbors if not for the four states between Ohio and Texas. The essay is about the author, Scott Russell Sanders’, attempt to understand what women feel that they are missing; when in his experiences a man life has little if any privileges. I relate in every way with the author’s ideas. There is nothing I can’t connect with because I’ve heard these stories since I was two and see it all in my head.
Sanders describes the pain and hardship that husbands and fathers had to endure. He, also, describes the advantages that wives and mothers had. He feels confused when he first is told of women’s oppression. He has never seen women’s work as hard when compared to that of men. Not until later in life does he look back and see, exactly, what women had to withstand. Sanders had never seen “...what a prison a house could be,” (77), until he took the time to look back in retrospect and see for himself.

I agree with Sanders; men did have it much harder, physically, than the women. However, women’s lives were, mentally, just as difficult if not more so. Growing up, hearing stories my whole life of my grandfather working until his hands bled and only coming home, during the day, to bandage them; and my grandmother raising four children and keeping the housework done, the whole time keeping a vegetable garden; I was adjusted to these images. While reading the essay, I saw my grandfather’s “...hands tattooed with scars,” (Sanders 76), and my grandmother “...cater all day to the needs of young children,” (Sanders 77). Depending on the way you saw it one had it harder, but still, men and women both had difficult lives.

Sanders has written a compelling essay on his life but not everyone has lived his life. And not everyone has grownup hearing similar stories, so their opinions on the genders’ burdens will inevitably differ.

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