Summary Of Louise Bogan's 'Women' By Louise Bogan

“Women” by Louise Bogan Louise Bogan married her husband, Curt Alexander in 1916, and had a child a year later. In 1920, Curt Alexander died, causing Bogan to become a widow and left her with no reliable income and an adolescent to care for. After moving to New York City, later on, Bogan met other writers, this sparked her writing career. After writing multiple reviews for periodicals, she later wrote the poem “Women” (Louise Bogan). Throughout the course of this poem, Bogan uses metaphors, imagery, and the setting to show that women are seen as incapable of doing what men do. Louise Bogan shows how women are not treated fairly by using metaphors throughout her poem. The metaphors helped create meaning and emotion and helped the reader have a better understanding of the poem. Bogan states women have a good heart but cannot use it to their desire by saying, “Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts” (3). The cell Bogan describes helps the reader understand the confinement being shown in this line. Men only saw women as property in this time period and women could not do anything about it because that is how society viewed them. This is showing that women were restrained to do many things, and sadly, women were content with it. Furthermore, Bogan also uses another metaphor, “As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills/They should let it go by” (19-20). This is a metaphor because if one takes anything over a door-sill, that means one is bringing something