A Switcheroo

Over the past month or so we have been discussing feminist literature and its impact on society.  I think one subject which has not been covered in this unit is possibility that men and women are changing roles.  I see it in works like the Awakening and A Doll House.  For hundreds of years, it was thought that all women could do was stay at home and rear the children because the mental capacity of women is lower than that of men.  We know now that is not true at all, in fact in recent years, more women are going to college than men.  In the Awakening and A Doll House, the husbands are the workers supporting the family but their mindset is a conformist mindset.  It is the wives who have the ability to think outside the box.  In my opinion, this takes more intellectual power.  The husbands are sheep blindly following the pack.  But characters such as Nora and Edna have the daring to be different.  Edna even recognizes that she is different to the point where it drives her to suicide.  For Nora, her outstanding is more of an accident.  But both these characters have something in common, they leave their husbands.  These works, written in the 1800s, were ahead of their time.  Nowadays, the women being the breadwinner is more and more common.  In my own family, my mom is a director of a library and my dad is a stay at home writer.  A hundred years ago, this would have been unheard of.  Until next time, I'm quite content in AP.