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Comparing 'Flower Feet And Barbie Doll'

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Societies have a few on how women should look and act. The standard of beauty is different in each society, but they all are to fit the idea of men, and the roles are the same way. Women are expected to meet the beauty imposed upon them by society. One could be perfectly healthy, smart, and funny. However, if the woman is not beautiful, which is defined by what men think, she shall be ignored and viewed as unwanted. In “Flower Feet” by Ruth Fainlight the narrator tells of how women would ruin their feet to fit into unbelievable small shoes. “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy shares the same concepts of how men expect women to be beautiful. Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” the wife of the narrator is murdered because she is not simply allowed to explore her curiosity. The societies have oppressed the women into falling for the standard of beauty presented by men and forced the women into fitting wife …show more content…

Young girls are forced to wear awful shoes that are “like toys” (2). The young girls must fit into small shoes that often make the foot grow in a wrong position, and the toes fold under the feet causing them to break. The pain of having toes broken constantly is awful itself, but when they are bent back and secured tight is worse. The experience is compared to “raw stumps” and how the stumps would have felt better than leaving the toes broken in the shoes (8). Girls from a young age have been forced to break their toes and change the natural shape of feet. It is the young girl's role to wear the tiny shoes to look delicate in order to get married into wealthy families. The mothers are forced by the roles of the society to make the daughters endure the torture. The poor girls are used as a means to make the family wealthy rather than consider the pain the girls will face. The only reason the girls face such awful pain is to get

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498 Words | 2 Pages

The majority of the girls followed the same description noted in the epigraph. The narrator stated, “The whole pack was irritating, bewildered, depressed” (Russell, 229). The pack discovered it difficult to wear shoes and walk on two feet. For them it was, “disorienting…to look down and seem two squared two shoes, instead of [our] own two feet” (Russell, 229). Average human norms were foreign concepts to the pack and caused them to feel uncomfortable and miserable, but they still strived to be a civilized human girls.

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1035 Words | 5 Pages

(Cisneros 40) The characteristic. figurative language, reveals in Esperanza’s childhood that she is very excited to have those high heels on in the beginning. We know by the end of this vignette that she regrets wearing those shoes but at the beginning of “The Family of Little Feet”, Esperanza is delighted to be able to be like Cinderella and wear “adult” shoes. Cisneros utilizes this characteristic of vignettes to relate the way that Esperanza's feet fit in the shoes to something the reader can easily

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586 Words | 3 Pages

In this vignette, Esperanza, Lucy and Rachel receive Fancy shoes as a gift from a lady who doesn’t need them anymore. Esperanza, Lucy and Rachel wear them and walk around their area. Growing up is shown when Mr. Benny, the owner of a corner grocery, says, “Them are dangerous, you girls are too young to be wearing shoes like that.” During their walk around a drunk man tries to convince one of the girls to kiss him, revealing that these shoes are indeed dangerous. This displays the theme of growing up because the girls like the shoes they received and are beginning to enter an age where they start to attract

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867 Words | 4 Pages

“I was never a beautiful women, and for that reason I’ve spent most of my life suffering from the shame of falling short of an unattainable standard” (87). Mairs starts off by telling us she was never a beautiful woman. By describing herself as this, it acts as an attention getter so the readers can become more interested in the reading. By putting emphasis on the topic of society 's standards for woman allows Mairs to go into greater depth with the topic, allowing readers to gain more knowledge and understanding of what the standards are like for a woman. A sullen tone is maintained throughout this chapter as Mairs describes the society 's standards for women leaving the readers a choice on how they feel about these standards.

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527 Words | 3 Pages

Women constantly face the battle of learning to love themselves in a society where natural beauty is not considered true beauty, to the point where women fight amongst each other over issues that patriarchy has instilled. For example, “body shaming is defined as inappropriate, negative statements and attitudes toward another person’s weight or size” (how is body shaming defined?). In the poem “when the Fat Girl Gets Skinny” the usage of extended metaphors about social constructs, Baird showcases how body shaming caused her to resort to having an eating disorder. In her poem, Baird states “as a child, “fat was the first word people used to describe me/ which didn’t offend me until I found out it was supposed to.”

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805 Words | 4 Pages

They both critique our culture’s misogyny and rigid standards of beauty. In “Losing Bodies”, Susie Orbach argues that modern Western beauty standards have a profoundly negative impact on women, encouraging women to take drastic measures to conform to the mainstream ideal of beauty. Duhamel refers to this in her poem, “The Limited Edition Platinum Barbie”. Orbach also claims that gender roles dictate what behavior is acceptable for women (248), as does Duhamel in her poem, “One Afternoon When Barbie Wanted to Join the Military”. Although these works express similar concerns, they are presented very differently.

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1033 Words | 5 Pages

A girl can be seen as beautiful and attractive, but continued to be shunned - all because they don’t wear the latest trends in fashion (but what if they like wearing solid colors or nerdy shirts from Walmart?). They may have a great personality that would attract many suitors in the nineteenth century, but if it is not up to the status of some people, they’re deemed unworthy. It is honestly one of the saddest things I have witnessed and experienced. Through The Body Project, Brumberg explains how American girls have shifted from judging a girl through her personality and internal character to judging through her appearance.

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672 Words | 3 Pages

CATCHY TITLE HERE Why are women idealized only for their body? WAYG, WHYB, by Joyce Carol Oates is a fictional shorttory. Through Joyce’s display of femisinsm, a pedophile seduces a young female to come with him and use her for her body, which reveals society’s expectations of a woman in this time period.

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1625 Words | 7 Pages

Imagine being told as a female in today’s world you must look or act a ¬¬certain way in order to be accepted. Being what you want to be is not allowed and changes have to be made in order to be included. They say “pain is beauty, and beauty is pain” as they way a woman looks today are completely different from ten or even fifty years ago. In this paper, the reader will understand the mind of a woman in today’s society and the difficulties to be not only accepted but being her own person as well. Not only has the appearance of a woman changed but also role titles and job descriptions as well.

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655 Words | 3 Pages

In their first appearance in “The Family of Little Feet”, Esperanza and her friends try on high heels and "the men can't take their eyes off" them, implying that they are seen in a more mature light when they wear high heels. One man tells them they are "too young to be wearing shoes like that", which highlights the connection between high heeled shoes and adult femininity. Moreover, in "The Monkey Garden” Esperanza sees the unfairness of being a girl when boys from the neighbourhood make her friend Sally kiss them and no one intervenes. Esperanza looks down at her “feet in their white socks and ugly round

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86 Words | 1 Pages

A custom that has become well known worldwide is the practice of foot-binding which was very popular before the Taiping society. Fascination with ballerinas of court led to many young women desiring tiny feet, no more than three inches long. Young girls, as early as five, had their feet tightly bound with cloth so that the arches were broken and pushed upward, this practice continued until the twentieth century. Although women have not practiced this tradition for centuries, they now experience different limitations and social

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504 Words | 3 Pages

Society, along with beauty pageants, have represented these changes and have set a standard for what a woman should look like in order to be considered beautiful.

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952 Words | 4 Pages

When one first meet her, one has to admit, first thing they notice is her looks. Right? “wow she have it all” or maybe the opposite. Beauty for women may be easier for them, like getting out of an officer giving them a ticket or walking into a restaurant without a reservation. Beautiful women could get more smiles, more handsome men, and better treatment sometimes.

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840 Words | 4 Pages

The meaning of beauty should change in our society and it should not be superficial but within oneself. Beauty in the eyes of society is viewed as physical appearance, like a perfect body or having facial features like a model. Beauty in their opinion is someone who has pretty eyes,

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627 Words | 3 Pages

Even though the problem of women having to fit into this category is not that big of a problem in this century. However, there is a problem of women having to look like certain way to fit into this idea of what women should look like. There is this idea that a women has to look a certain way in order to be beautiful. I have become very vocal on this matter because I truly believe that every women is beautiful. I relate to Tessie Hutchinson from the story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.

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