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A Brave Little Girl Analysis

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The Girls Own Paper was a guiding manual for impressionable young ladies during the late 19th century. It included segments on cooking, cleaning, how to dress, how to look your best, etc. Its focus was on creating and instilling the idea of the perfect woman in its younger female audience to better society. Its male counterpart, The Boys Own Paper, is also instructional and entertaining while appealing to a male audience with stories of adventure, bravery, and how to act with honor and masculinity in various scenarios. Both papers had a similar effect to male and female advertised magazines of today’s era and enforced gender norms on young men and women while ridiculing those who step outside society’s realm of acceptance through a different …show more content…

The GOP also exemplifies bravery in women in a patronizing way. “A Brave Little Girl” (1880) illustrates this, condescendingly including “little” as a way to devalue the heroine. The girl is brave simply because she has tried to save her governess, who had fallen into a body of water and began drowning. Trying to pull her out, the young lady loses her balance and falls in after her. She yells for help and a workman conveniently passes by and saves both. The story was included in the paper because it insinuates that a woman can have fearless qualities, however, she cannot act on them without a man’s aid. In contrast, the BOP uses the article “Jacques Faubert, The Drummer Boy” (1880) to portray a boy being solemnly brave about dying for his country. His enlistment as a soldier saddens his mother, who is then comforted by the fact that his involvement in the war will bring her honor. At 13 years old he is shot in the head and wounded and meets Napoleon himself, who asks him what he wants to be awarded, to which he responds, “To die in your service, sire.” Eventually he passes away, and it was important that the message was given to his mother that he had died bravely, because any other way would be wrong, according to their values. The ideal being instilled in young men here is that no matter how old they are, they must be prepared to fight and die for their country fearlessly and with minimal

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For the 19th century America, the two sexes were to be separated into distinct spheres, the man’s public sphere and the woman’s private one. It was most common for the two sexes to spend their time mostly in the company of their own sex, and advices were given to the younger members of the society on the proper way of behaving according to one’s sex. Even though both sexes had to be instructed on how to perform in each other’s company, it was the shaping of a woman that needed to undergo through a series of instructions on the proper way to be a woman. A woman had to follow the rules of the Cult of True Womanhood to be considered proper and wife material. Fanny Fern in her writing appeals on and discusses the attributes of piety, purity, submissiveness,

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Every once in awhile, shows such as Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best come up while surfing the tv guide. While these are two examples of remarkably popular television shows of the mid 1900’s, they also portray the gender normalities of the time period. Gender roles were simply and precisely defined. Men went to work and made the money, while the women stayed home to take care of the house and kids. However, as humanity enters the sixteenth year of the twenty first century, this precision begins to blur.

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In the nineteenth century, woman had no power over men in society. They were limited in their freedom, as their lives were controlled by their husbands. Some women did not mind this lifestyle, and remained obedient, while some rebelled and demanded their rights. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, are short stories that exposes the lifestyle women lived in the nineteenth century. The protagonists from both stories, Jane and Georgiana, similarly lived a male dominated lifestyle.

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Drummer boys sometimes fought too, but most importantly they always looked out for each other. The column marched forward as the sound of cannon fire thundered in the distance. The soldiers marched forward fearing what was ahead. At the front of the marching column, a young excited boy led the men into battle while beating his drum to the tune of “Battle Cry of Freedom”.

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1358 Words | 6 Pages

This proved to be dangerous for the sports-loving soldiers because nearly 2,500,000 were injured or killed throughout the war, and proved that war is a sport, and like a sport, but a very hostile and dangerous sport at that. The article has good flow, and is well organized with just the right amount of facts and story to keep the piece going, and also keeps the reader attentive to the message Alexander is conveying to her

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665 Words | 3 Pages

Present throughout the book is the theme of disillusionment. In the school, they’ve been told by their schoolmasters and parents that unless they join the war, they would remain cowards. They see propaganda after propaganda, all alluding towards the glory of battle and warfare. Out on the front, they realize that nothing was further from the truth. Their dreams of being heroes shattered, like when they compare themselves to the soldier on a poster in chapter 7.

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The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo has many critical approaches within it, but the gender approach was one consistent approach with its three concepts of gender roles, masculinity and femininity, and patriarchy and matriarchy. From the beginning of this reading, the gender roles concept was frequently used to compare characters and their roles in the story. As a punishment, Marjorie would be forced to act like a boy by her parents, who referred to it as “boying” days. “On boying days there would always be a job to do, a house repair project usually…it was almost as if he really did want a son there to help him” (Merullo 74). As a female, it was as uncommon for one to participate in house repairs and outdoor work, so the roles of gender were altered in this setting.

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Children's Literature is everlastingly framed by variable ideologies; this represented the standards and values of a didactic society in the nineteenth century, which was controlled transcendently by the church. Enforcing religious perspectives on the idealistic family life, gender roles were compulsory in respectability, and a woman's place was inside the home. The nineteenth century was an extremely confusing time, with its firm Victorian qualities, class limits, industrialism and expansionism. It was the time when society was a male dominated society in which women were controlled by the male figures in the society.

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It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.

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In this time frame, heroes, cowards, and casualties categorize men. Inman, the male protagonist of the novel, encounters men fit and unfit for the masculine roles expected by society. Due to the vast amount of soldier casualties, men were required to enlist in the war in 1863. As a result, some headed

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He shows how even the people risking their lives do not even care much for war and have become so numb to the horrors of their situation. The main character Fred Collins makes a journey through a death field risking his life for water that was then spilled by his comrades. While Fred was on his journey into the battle zone, “He wondered why he did not feel some keen agony of fear” and this is because he has become numbed to all the dead surrounding him. Meanwhile instead of being present in their state of being under attack, and put effort into their side of the war some of the men discuss “..the greatest questions of the national existence.” This showcases how even the men whose lives are at risk could care less about what is actually happening in the war around them.

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The Cult of True Womanhood in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In her essay “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”, Barbara Welter discusses the expected roles and characteristics that women were supposed to exhibit in accordance with the extreme patriarchy of the nineteenth-century America. The unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is seen to conform and ultimately suffer from this patriarchal construct that Welter labels the Cult of True Womanhood. The narrator falls victim to this life of captivity by exhibiting several of the fundamental characteristics that Welter claims define what a woman was told she ought to be.

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It is also through Kincaid 's use of her setting, constructive atmosphere, and one sentence structure that some readers can better understand the mother 's belief of how productivity will lead to a respected life. After reading "Girl" readers are now made more aware of the direct relation between domestic knowledge and strict gender roles being forced onto

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Many critics agree on one fact about Canadian author Alice Munro: one of her most notable qualities in regards to her work is the distinct use of realism in her writing. Her writing provides a strong sense of familiarity to the reader, while also containing stronger metaphorical meanings that one can note when they begin to closely look at her work. Her short story “Boys and Girls” portrays the socialization of a young girl, once very close to her father and unaware of any sort of gender bias within her society, into a young woman with a pessimistic view of femininity and her expected position in society. This story shows the socialization process in a way that makes it easy to recognize, illustrating circumstances that the reader can notice the blatant sexism and misogyny; however, its portrayal is extremely realistic, allowing the reader to recall how oblivious they may have been in the past during times that they have been impacted by social biases in our world. Critics of Munro typically agree on her overall theme of femininity and coming of age in her writings; “Boys and Girls” emphasizes the ways in which young girls are socialized into a seemingly natural understanding of the sexist expectations and gender roles.

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Women have social pressures to conform to particular ways of behaving and looking. The pressures are so huge not all women are aware of such situations. The women are so use to living to conformed ways we label the ones who actually act normal as “weird and abnormal”. Piercy shows how we are unconscious of what’s happening, how a regular girl that is going through puberty judge so badly for being normal. Our social and cultural construct on women’s values society has created has only been about making a profit.

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