Death Foretold Sexism

Women today are made to feel empowered; they can do anything they set their minds to. Even though this is true, women are still often discriminated against in the workplace, at school, and even at home. Women are usually classified as the weaker sex and are not always treated as equal as men. Sexism plays a major role in today's society and in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her beauty in conjunction measured a woman's worthiness as a wife with her ability to gracefully run all aspects of a household. A woman's happiness in a marriage is not significant unless she is fortunate enough to marry someone she loves. In this Spanish culture, unlike Western culture, marriage is not based on love.

In the Colombian town where Victoria Guzman lived, women were considered lower than men. Men could do anything they wanted and have anything they wanted, including the women. For Ibrahim Nasar that meant
Maria Alejandrina Cervantes is a prostitute, but her description of herself and her home is a positive one. Maria is not depicted as a shameful woman with a dirty profession, but as a beautiful woman who taught all the men of the community about sex, " We'd been together at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house until after three, when she herself sent the musicians away and turned out the lights in the dancing courtyard so that her pleasurable mulatto girls could get some rest...Maria Alejandrina Cervantes was the most elegant and the most tender woman I have ever known, and the most serviceable in bed, but she was also the strictest. She'd been born and reared here, and here she lived, in a house with open doors, with several rooms for rent and an enormous courtyard for dancing lit by lantern gourds bought in the Chinese bazaars of Paramaribo" (49-50). Woman in the Colombian culture can either accept the social codes leading their sexuality, or they can abandon