A Woman's Role: Home or Otherwise...?

Brandi Nocera

Engl 215

Prof. Koehler

I think that women should have the ability to choose what they want to do. I’m somewhere in that elusive gray area between feminists who think every woman wants to work 12 hours a day and a stay-at-home-mom is oppressed, and “anti-feminists” who think that a woman’s place is in the home, barefoot and pregnant. It’s frustrating sometimes - since I am female – that one person says I need to have a career and another says I’m only good for a bed-warmer. I should be able to make up my own mind on what I want to do; it is my life after all, ne?

And I guess what makes it just as frustrating is that women from just about any time have had to lay prostrate to male counterparts (when without a woman, how can there be man?) and now that we think women should have equal rights (which we should), we (men and women) attack literary texts and ideologies from any time in which women are subservient to man. Is it wrong that I’m ok with it in old literature? I don’t exactly like the fact that women were thought of a “Domestic Angels” like Patmore thought. I don’t like that women were thought to be inferior to men, but that was how men thought – men like Patmore and Keats. It’s something that women have had to overcome, and I’m ok with that – because we’ve overcome. 

I’m actually kind of reminded of the street preachers. The guy who drinks Holy Water from the jug said that “the only place for my wife is behind the stove”. His wife replied that she’s also “sometimes allowed behind the vacuum”. Yes, it makes me angry that the couple really believes that in their heart of hearts, but it makes me even angrier that they’re trying to push their beliefs onto others.

Writers such as Nightingale and Dickenson were wonderful writers, but they weren’t really taken seriously (Dickenson was also a hermit, and that didn’t help much; most of her work was post-mortem). Mary Shelly wrote a fantastic piece of literature, but to get it read, she had to take a man’s name. And that makes me mad, but it also makes me mad when people attack history – when they’re just being hypocritical; doing the same thing, just on the opposite side of the argument.

Women still today go by male or sexually ambiguous pen-names – like Norah Roberts. She goes by J.D. Robb for her "In Death" series. She hasn’t come straight out and said why she uses Robb for her mystery/suspense novels and Roberts for her romance novels, but Roberts has been criticized for her choice. I don’t care: it’s good literature. So I thought that she was a he the first time I read one of her In Death novels, so what? It doesn’t change the story in the book any. It still really entertained me.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t care what people say based off of history because it’s history, and all we can do in the present is guess based off of vague literal references and artists’ talented paintings. Instead of accepting history, critics become the Gloria Ironbox from “Family Guy”. Live and let live – ask but don’t judge. Think but don’t accuse. Readers don’t have to like what happened (or happens sometimes) but we have to… have to realize that sometimes things are out of our control.