that Chaucer is guilty of this type of antifeminist presentation, but she also finds that the term can have a broader sense as including not simply satirical caricatures or women but any presentation of a woman's nature that is intended to conform her to male expectations of what she is or ought to be and not to her own views of the matter (Weissman 93-94).
The Wife of Bath is introduced in the General Prologue along with the rest of the pilgrims. The wife of Bath is a woman of independent mind and body. She is also a successful small manufacturer and can be seen as a strong challenge to the male status quo. Of all the women in Chaucer, she is perhaps the most contemporary-seeming, and she represents potent and innovative social ideas as well as business concepts. She stands for the primacy of experience over authority, meaning the validity of the ideas of ordinary people against those in authority. The Wife of Bath expresses a feminist argument in the opening sequence as she turns clerical authority on its head to argue the feminist cause by way of a knowledge of the traditional materials of anti-feminist diatribe (Knight 98).
The Wife of Bath loves to engage in the offering of alms to show her piety and to affirm that she is one of the leading citizens and thus to be admired, but she is also very much the sensual woman. She has had five husbands and other lovers:
Bold was her face, and handsome; florid too.
She had been respectable all her life,
And five times married, that's to say in church,
Not counting other loves she'd had in youth. . .
Chaucer creates women who are rounded and real, with different facets to their personalities. The Wife of Bath is a sensuous woman who has had five husbands and numerous lovers, and she is also devout, having been to the Holy Land to assert her devotion and also being given to donating to the church so her neighbors will know she is devoted. Her behavior is ...