Summary Of Life In The Iron Mills

“Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis is a story that provokes feminism as defined by Lerner within its characters. It is easiest to see this correspondence when you break Lerner’s definition down into its integral points. Namely, “the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group”, one that is deemed so by society, that women “must join with other women to remedy these wrongs”, and, finally, that women should “provide an alternate vision of societal organization” that better reflects gender equality (Lerner). Davis’s characters go through a period of awakening where they begin to reflect all of these hallmarks of feminist consciousness.
In order to be feminist one must be aware of the inequality that feminism strives