Sula Gender Equality

Throughout history, women have strived to “break the glass ceiling” and destroy the gender barriers which have kept them to lives of inequality. This has never been an easy undertaking as modifying rules and ideas which the general public accepts is an unfavorable task. Women, but particularly women of the lower class and of color face ostracization when attempting to destroy societal confinements, because they have no power with which to execute these actions. Both women and men, and people of all economic standing resist change and stick to societal rules as they fear their own ostracization. Everyone submits to society, but men have the ability to control society because of their power. It takes an audacious individual to ignore social norms and pursue their own agenda. In Sula by Toni

Sula seeks liberation by avoiding the restraints of marriage. Throughout the novel, she is ridiculed for being unwed. Her mother and grandmother weren’t married, but unlike Sula, they never made the decision to live that way. Sula seeks the freedom of unmarried life despite the shame her family and community places on her for not seeking a man. “I don 't want to make anybody else. I want to make myself” (Morrison 92). Sula longs to be an individual in a world which tells women they must find a husband to be whole. Even as a child, Sula knew she must create herself to gain the freedom she did not have as a Black woman. “Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had to set about creating something else” (Morrison 52). Because of their race and gender, Sula and Nel will never experience the luxury of automatic freedom. Knowing this, Nel settles down and becomes a wife and mother. Sula goes out chasing the freedom which eludes her, breaking the conventional female role in pursuit of