“It is better to be a man than a woman.” This common belief is rooted in the economy, politics, even all the way down to how fathers treat their daughters. The poem “The Changeling” by Judith Ortiz Cofer reflects gender stereotypes by showing male favoritism through a daughter seeking attention from her father by cross dressing, acting like a boy, and rejecting all normal female conventions.
The narrator throughout the poem is a young girl telling of a game she invented to draw attention from her father. In the game, the little girl cross dressed and pretended to be a great war leader. The act of dressing as a boy was humorous to the father as it states in lines 4 and 5 (Source 1). Her mother however, was not so amused. In fact, the mother