A Society That's Something Next to Normal

          For this month's blog, I would like to expand upon the idea brought up in the Cult of Domesticity discussion. The idea was that what society thinks of women completely contradicts what the general populous of women are taught. Society glamorizes sex and beauty in women while we are taught to be modest intellectuals that can change the world. 

          And it's sad to think that our views on women have come so far and we've given so many freedoms to women yet society still chooses to objectify and degrade them. If you look at the works  The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both written at the end of the 19th century, you can see how the views of women have drastically changed since the societal opinions are reflected in the works of the time period.

          In The Awakening, Edna was expected to be subservient to her husband. When Mr. Pontellier believed that one of his children was ill while on vacation, he made Edna get up to check on the child.  When they went back to New Orleans, Edna was expected to stay in the house in case callers came to visit. And why did she continue to do these things? To conform to the societal role of women or be outcasted (or until she reached the breaking point and made her deadly decision.) In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator was kept in a room in her house because she was deemed "ill" by her husband. since he was a doctor, the narrator has simply become a lab-rat, an object for her husband where he can do anything to her as she is seen as "his property" during this time period. By keeping the narrator in the room, she is slowly losing her sanity because she is beginning to see creatures run around the grounds and becomes obsessed with the wallpaper. Soon the narrator reaches her breaking point and completely loses sanity as she has submerged herself in the removal of the yellow wallpaper. 

          There was a recent event that happened to me that contradicts everything I've known and have been taught about the value of women. I was working backstage during one of the school's play practices this year, trying to cut a material in half to be used for structural purposes. Except the way I was cutting it was not working correctly and I was getting frustrated and ready to give up. One of the male crew members said something to me (which I do not recall) and I replied with, "We can't do it, we're women." Now the teacher supervising this (who has known me for four years) quickly turns to me and said, "I can't believe you let yourself say that," because for those four long years this teacher has known me to be tough and willing to get my hands dirty as I am not the prissy type. I didn't have a reply for her that day, but upon contemplating the situation I found that I had blamed my own gender on my inabilities to cut things rather than my short-temperedness. Which, in all honesty, is the worst thing I can do because if other women begin doing this, that's just going to make it ok for men to do it and then society will be right back to where it was over a century ago. 

         With every leap ahead there will always be a few steps back. I'm glad that women have the freedoms that they have if only we could stray away from the objectification and contradiction that is always in pursuit. I already believe that women can do just as much as men and men can do just as much as women. maybe it'll just take another century before we're all on a level playing field. But then again to change society's value of women, we must first change ourselves. Do we, as individuals, conform to society's glamor or do we obey our own moral obligations and treat others as individuals regardless of gender?