Women: the Root of All Evil?

Women: The Root of All Evil?
Author, congresswoman, and woman of the year Clare Booth Luce once said, "Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, ‘Women don't have what it takes.'" Women have been continually downtrodden in society, and it reflects in our literature and media. Women have, throughout time, been treated like second-class citizens, and the problems still continue. Although women's treatment in first world countries has become almost equal to that of men, they are still looked down upon in most other parts of the world. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her revolutionary work The Second Sex, that in order for women to become equal, they need to stand up to their oppressors and fight back. A woman's acceptance of her status is no one's fault but her own. For this reason women have taken many roles in revolutionary literature. Women's lives have been built around traditional roles and laws for thousands of years. In Goodwin's A Sorrowful Woman, the mother becomes bored with the monotony of everyday housekeeping and mothering duties. When her husband hires a nanny to help, she becomes disillusioned by her existence. The mother kills herself because of the worthlessness that she has created for her own life. This is the story for lots of women; they detest their everyday lives but do nothing to better themselves. What would women do if they had nothing? For this reason Wollstonecraft rejects her rich counterparts needless and vain existence in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. These women do not work for anything, and are doing nothing to advance themselves. Wollstonecraft believed women should become strong, intelligent human beings and free themselves from their dependence on men. Women need to adopt the strong, masculine qualities that men embody, and adapt them to a womanlier and more powerful identity. In the French Lieutenant's Woman,