Women in the Late 19th Century
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, is a play about a woman who realizes that she is worth more than she has been given credit. Her whole life she was treated like a little doll; too fragile to do anything serious, too frail to be troubled with real business. She was the wife, mother and homemaker. The only things she was perceived as capable of were running the home, raising the children and looking pretty. This was a common stereotype for women in the 1880’s. Women were treated as possessions, not people.
Women had a specific role they had to fill. They had to look just so, act just so, raise the children in a certain way, and keep up the house in a perfect way. Many women tried to fill this position of the “perfect housewife”. They wore corsets that put about 22 pounds of pressure on their internal organs, which caused cracked ribs, displacement of the liver and uterine prolapsed and collapsed lungs, all just to look the way men wanted......
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Approximate Word Count: 1041
Approximate Pages: 5 (260 words per double-spaced page) |