Walt Whitman Gender Equality

Walt Whitman uses his poems to demonstrate gender equality by addressing the male and female forms as equals. After describing himself as a universal poet, of both “the woman the same as the man.” Whitman says that it is, “As great to be a woman as it is to be a man”(Whitman 24). During his lifetime, women were viewed as inferior to men; they did not have voting rights, and “contained fewer multitudes economically, intellectually, and psychologically” (Pollak 108). Whitman, on the contrary, expresses his respect for women as equals to men, and does not view one above the other. He, unlike other poets of the time, he shines a positive light on women and glorifies their strength and power. Whitman makes the decision in “Song of Myself” to direct

Whoever degrades another degrades me”(28). Whitman encourages his readers to remove the barrier between genders, by physically removing the “door,” the obstacle that separates men and women. Vivian R. Pollak writes in her essay “‘In Loftiest Spheres’: Whitman’s Visionary Feminism”, that Whitman’s solution to breaking down these stereotypes is to suspend the “sexual, racial and social norms” (Pollak 98). Rather than referring to women and men as two isolated groups, he removes the “door” which disregards the notion of unequal gender roles. Whitman encourages readers to break down the social barrier artificially imposed by society on genders allowing him to relate to both men and

This poem was viewed as unorthodox when published because of its free discussion and exploration of the body. In the second stanza, Whitman clarifies that he is writing about both the male and the female body, saying, “that of the male, and that of the female is perfect” (Whitman 94). By joining the two clauses by “and”, it demonstrates equality since he is displaying the physical words, “male” and “female” on equal terms. This was a radical point of view during Whitman 's time, when women were accepted as socially, and sexually inferior to