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Allusion In Housewife

1608 Words7 Pages

Imagine being told that you are only good in the household, cooking and cleaning. Imagine trying to work, facing discrimination if you do so. This was how society was in the 1960s-70s concerning women’s workplace rights. “The 38 percent of American women who worked in 1960 were largely limited to jobs as teacher, nurse, or secretary”(The 1960s-70s American Feminist Movement). In this time period, 62% of women did not have a job, they were stay-at-home wives rather, who cooked, cleaned, and took care of children. The other 38% of employed women were very limited to the professions they could be respected doing. The poem Housewife, Written in 1962 by Anne Sexton, uses feminist theory to portray a woman in the 1960s who is devoted to maintaining a household, something most women in this time period are forced to do by society. To portray …show more content…

Sexton alludes to Jonah from the story in the bible Jonah and The Whale to convey the actions of the woman’s husband. Another literary device used by Sexton is Personification. She personifies a house as a living thing in which they marry along with their husbands. The last major literary device used is metaphor. Sexton compares women to their mothers, which is a common theory.
Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928 and raised in Weston (poetryfoundation.org). She had a complicated relationship with her parents which was possibly abusive (poetryfoundation.org). After graduating from boarding school she attended Garland Junior College for 1 year. As early as 19, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II (poetryfoundation.org). Anne was actually a fashion model in 1950 and 1951 (Sexton, Anne (1967)). Sexton gave birth to two children, one in 1953 and the other in 1955 (poetryfoundation.org). She suffered from postpartum depression, this means that her depression was triggered by the birth of her

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