Feminism vs. the modern woman
In this essay I will discuss the impact feminism has on the modern woman.
Around the early 60’s and the years before that women were home stayed mothers/women who took care of the work around the house such as cooking, cleaning etc. They wanted to do more with their life than just cook and clean, so they also wanted to have a job and make their own money. In the 60’s women began the feminism. They wanted a life for themselves. As we see in the short story, The yellow wallpaper, the woman is ‘fighting’ for her own freedom. She is dominated by her husband, but she is breaking free of it. Women had by then for many years been the weak sex and they wanted to show men that they could do so much more than just to stay home. Many women such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer helped founding organizations for women who wanted to come out of the hole dominating man relationships. In Little Red Cap and Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf are there two very clear examples on how the feminism has impacted the modern woman. Little Red Cap is the more traditional fairytale of those two. Little Red Cap goes to her grandmother with food from her mother, she goes through the woods and meats the wolf, and in the end grandmother and Little Red Cap got eaten, and the hero is the huntsman. It shows us that women cannot take care of themselves; they need a man to do it for them. In contrast to that fairytale there is Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf where Little Red Riding Hood conquers the wolf by herself which makes her the hero.
Nowadays women have to be a career woman. It, of course, does not have to be one of the most demanding hardworking jobs, but she has to earn enough to could be an independent woman. The majority of women today want a family, a nuclear family, and that usually means that the woman has to have a job and take care of the home. It is also the definition of a superwoman. For many women it is hard to balance both work and a family, so because of the demanding women who in the 60’s needed to prove the men wrong, so I imagine that they put their “targets” way to high, so together with the men’s work- and family life over the years has evolves, the women just had to follow them. Society, I think, is one of the bigger reasons that people generally have to many things to balance at one time. Everything gets more modern, so the same will the gender roles.
Feminism is, in my opinion, both fighting and causing the oppression of women. I believe that some women are fighting so much that it goes the other way around. Some women has the idea that saying that the women’s places are in the kitchen is some kind of oppression of women, so they are against women in kitchens, but I think that that is some kind of oppression that they think that. For me it is strange that feminism has not brought us farther along, then to the place where we are still offended by “the women’s place is in the kitchen”!
I do not think that there only is one answer to whether feminism influences the modern woman positively or negatively. I think it is a bit like a tree with many branches - it is both positive and negative. The negative branches are such as the many things women have to balance at once and the positive branches are such as the fact that women do not have to live just inside their house - they can go out know and get a “real” job, and be the independent woman we all really just want to be.