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Women's Role In The Great Gatsby

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The role of women in the 1920’s was to start to break free from their social cages. They were expected to be precious and helpless, but women of the “Roaring Twenties” were making dynamic changes. For example, “When passed in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote” (Women in the 1920s in North Carolina). Although they were, by no means, completely liberated, in the 1920’s, women were beginning their escape from learned helplessness and the limitations that society enforced. F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrated the chaos, complexity, and confusion that resulted from the inconsistency of the role that women were “supposed” to play and the role that women began to play.
The role of women in previous years was just a role. They were forced to act “lady-like”, be beautiful, and meet other requirements of their husbands and male-dominant society. During World War 1, many women went to work to fill the gap in the labor force. After the war, many …show more content…

In “The Great Gatsby”, Jordan Baker was a flapper. She was a cold and direct professional golfer, who “instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men” and had a hard, cynical personality. Jordan was displayed in a negative manner, as she was said to be “incurably dishonest”. The reader was shown that the only way for a woman to be independent was to be careless and deceitful.
The role that women played in the 1920’s was to start to break free from their social cages. Frederick Douglass once said, “The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.” Years of oppression made women rebel and it was a controversial movement. Throughout “The Great Gatsby”, the female characters ultimately were portrayed in a negative manner, but the actions of those 1920’s women sparked dynamic

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