Women In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Although women have always been the ones who carry and care for the majority of the time since men worked all day, there has been a long-standing belief that women should let their significant others decide everything for them and that it is okay for men to severely reprimand their wives. This being said, there is more justification, for men, in domestic violence. Especially in the 19th century, men knew that they had the power to make decisions for their wife, and if they wanted to involve violence in the relationship because the man had the power to do as he wishes. Correspondingly, when this violence occurred, women were unable to get the help from authority figures because this level of bias was a society standard. Since men were the ones

It was often found that abuse would help men get what they wanted from women quickly, so this became a common solution to any problem endured by the husband. In like manner, modern women are encouraged to spurn a husband’s authoritative demands and denounce the abuse of wives (R E Dobash, 1-5). In Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator asks her husband, John, multiple times if they could switch rooms to sleep in, explaining her feelings for the room’s details. John tells her “no” and disregards the narrator’s emotions derived from staying in the room, forcing her to accept that she will suffer simply because he does not want to switch the rooms. This is a representation of women having to alter their lives around their husbands, even if it negatively affects them. Also seen in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, is the fear factor felt by wives when they worry about doing something that is not up to the husband’s standards; “And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.” (Gilman,

The same decade women began to receive more opportunities in economics, in society, and in the workplace. Realizing what changes could be made, women began wishing for true equality of men and women, thus creating the term feminist which was a growing classification. However, since the media was generally run by men at this time, the feminist movement quickly gained a negative view and was often criticized by men, primarily because it questioned their authority and men were more susceptible to a change in everything that has been done for as long as anyone could remember. In addition to this, government started publicly declaring the feminization of the man lifestyle wrong. Correspondingly, this created a negative connotation of feminists in the eyes of men, and various organizations were created to keep the masculinity and separation of men alive. Meanwhile, the feminists continued to advocate for different rights that women believed they deserved, such as new birth-control, and marriage reforms. Men felt threatened by the demands made by women, specifically because of all of the progress that the gender has made already. And although the views that women held were changing rapidly, men held onto the traditional men characteristics; masculine, the breadwinner, strenuous lifestyle, etc. This need to feel