Gender In The Awakening

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Women through the Ages
The Awakening is a work about the societal gender relations and it brings into focus the negative effects of the society’s expectations on the woman’s growth as an individual separate person. The story is setup in the last part of the Victorian Era, a period which had many concerns with propriety, manners, and morals. The author gives a view of intra-psychic pain experienced by the main character, Edna, due to the societal expectations. The novel has special reference to the Creole culture, the themes of sexual expression, restrictive women’s culture, and “selfishness” or art before domestic duties are highlighted in the story. The impact of the themes’ novelty led to the book being banned.

It was only in the mid twentieth century that the contraception pill appeared a way of birth control. Edna felt the dread of her experience in childbirth, the ecstasy of pain, a stupor with deadened sensation, odor of chloroform, and the addition of new life beings to the great number of children she had born and died (115). The women in the 1800s were forced to abstain from sex when they were least fertile (between menstrual) and engaging in sexual intercourse at the time when they was a high probability to conceive. The women were forced to bear an average of six children excluding those lost in miscarriages and stillbirths. The women had to bear with the childbirth complications such as permanent damage to their bodies and lacerations which made subsequent births even more painful. Working class women did not have the opportunity to recover after childbirth because they were expected to resume work and domestic chores along with caring the newborn baby. None of the contraception prevention methods of the nineteenth century (aside from infanticide and abortion) were significantly effective and none of them were new. Withdrawal by the male, duct suppositories, and douching were around in precedent days and customary in the nineteenth century. In 1838 diaphragms and condoms were created with processed rubber but were not advocated for by most of the spouses as a birth control method but for preventing contraction of venereal diseases. The most effective method of preventing contraception was abstaining from sex; however this was not acceptable to most spouses as a birth control method. Today family planning is taught to women and equally to men. Women in marriages are at liberty to make decisions like if to take divorce after experience of