Women in work and marriage

Women and work and women and marriage cannot be separated in much of history because marriage was seen as the proper role for women, and the work done in the home was considered the proper form of work for a woman to undertake as her life's occupation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some women writers found ways to suggest that women should have more rights, that they should have more occupational opportunities than they did, and that marriage might or might not be the proper role for a women. In any case, whether or not to marry should be her choice and not that of society or her family. Some of these ideas are found in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and in Charlotte Brontd's Jane Eyre.

Mary Wollstonecraft was as famous a writer as her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, would become, but today the daughter is much the better known of the two largely because of her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and because of her creation of the story embodied in her novel Frankenstein. Both mother and daughter were important proponents of the rights of women, both in their writings and in the way they lived, and served as role models for other women of their time. Much of their work as writers and political thinkers developed from and represented the spirit of the Romantic era in which they lived.

Mary Wollstonecraft's best-known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a work in which she expounded on the ills facing women and on the need

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oil their tempers--is woman in a natural state (Wollstonecraft 178-179)? Mary Wollstonecraft sees women as dominated by men and as being prevented from developing fully. Emily Brontd shows a change in her heroine in the course of Jane Eyre--while Jane is from the first what might be deemed the plucky heroine, she becomes truly an individual and stronger than the men by the end of the novel. Hers is the moral voice of the story, much more so than any of the men could be. The character of Jane has relationships with Edward Rochester and with St. John Rivers, relationships that take on a very different character and that contrast different aspects of human interaction. The two men are very different, and their effect on Jane and the manner in which she deals with each illuminates the themes of the novel and illustrates the character of Jane in the structure of the novel. One of the primary concerns in the novel is love, and so with marriage, and one of the interesting elements of the novel is how Jane manages to find love and have it on her own terms. The story of the novel is Jane's and not the two men's, and reasers meet Jane long before she meets either of them. The opening sequences indicate the life she has led. She is fi

Category: History - W