Women and Economics and The Bell Jar - Essay Example

Gilman’s Arguments Arise Again Prior to the 1900s, women in developed societies were relegated to very specific roles in society and had little option but to follow through with them. Those women who worked outside of the boundaries of home and hearth were often ostracized from ‘polite’ society, were barely able to survive on their own wages and frequently found themselves in desperate conditions. This was because of the prevailing mood of their society in which women had been placed under the total protection of men, including the acquisition of their livelihood, shelter and food. In many cases, women were legally prevented from owning property, negotiate their own contracts or even keep any of their own wages. These restrictions on what a woman could do or own were partly due to the fact that most women were not considered intelligent enough to consider all the consequences involved in managing business or political situations. Most could not prove otherwise as they did not have the access to formal schooling that would have provided them with the skills necessary as proof. Many women who had the extreme benefit of understanding fathers to thus receive a decent education made the argument that the problem was not inherently a question of female ability but rather one of social conditioning, yet it wasn’t until the late 1800s that these ideas began to take hold and even then it remains questionable just how many of these ideas have actually changed. What Charlotte Perkins Gilman reveals of society in her book Women and Economics is found again between the lines of Sylvia Plath’s story in The Bell Jar written approximately 50 years later. A great deal of what Gilman argues in the first portions of her book is that women, in being forced to depend upon men for their livelihood as well as their natural urges to participate in the continuation of the species, have been forced to place too much importance on their ability or inability to attract a man. This is not necessarily her fault as a question of moral principles, but rather as the result of generations of an artificial convention that forces women to use their sex, their gender attractiveness, to both fulfill her required place in society as contributing to the continuation of the species as well as her only means of providing for her own welfare now and into the future. Because she was unable to work for herself with any degree of the comfort or success permitted to men, marriage to a successful man was her only option to a satisfying life. “Where both sexes obtain their food through the same exertions, from the same sources, under the same conditions, both sexes are acted upon alike, and developed alike by their environment. Where the two sexes obtain their food under different conditions, and where that difference consists in one of them being fed by the other, then the feeding sex becomes the environment of the fed. Man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment” (Gilman, Ch. 2). Although she feels it should remain the woman’s primary responsibility to raise and educate any children of the household, Gilman argues that women need to be able to break out of this stingy economic environment and be allowed to become something more than simply wife and mother. As she points out in her book, women are likely to have 50 years of life without children – first as children themselves before child-bearing age and then later when the children have been mostly raised and have gone off on their own. Although it might be expected that many of these issues would have changed in the 50 years that intervened between Gilman’s call for a new form of female economics and Sylvia Plath’s writing of The Bell Jar, but many of the same conditions of life can be discerned in Plath’s protagonist. The main protagonist in the story is Esther Greenwood, who is a college student poised on the edge of making her first big break into the world as a guest editor at a New York magazine. “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car” (Plath, Ch. 1). From the beginning, Esther is seen to have become what some might call a rising star because, even as a woman, she has escaped the lower-middle-class lifestyle of her home and entered the high society world of New York on her own merits and no one else’s. In this, she is very different from the world described by Gilman in that she is being afforded an education and has been offered an enviable job in the city. It is female characters that make the arrangements for her, she lives in a female dorm and she is provided for by a female benefactor. She has even been raised in a mostly female home as her father died when she was very young and her mother has worked to support her through all the intervening years. However, Esther has a difficult time finding her place within this society because it doesn’t match any of the typical roles she has traditionally been expected to play. She seems overwhelmed by the need to keep up with the news of the day and she seeks nothing so much as the ability to attract a handsome man, or any man. This is evidenced in her clumsy advances toward Constantin, the UN interpreter, and in the disastrous ending to her date with Marco. She has had a boyfriend in college, Buddy, but she is not particularly attracted to him while the first man she actually does sleep with seems incapable of the kind of devotion expected by women prior to the ‘sexual revolution’ advocated by Gilman. Esther’s entire sense of identity seems bound up within her ability to understand and attract a mate, just as Gilman has outlined in her book. “When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line” (Plath, Ch. 7). Esther expects that losing her virginity will be the magic pill that suddenly transforms her from being the shy and awkward teenager from college into the confident and successful businesswoman she sees in Jay Cee. When this doesn’t happen for her, she descends into the madness that almost destroys her. Because Plath’s novel is mostly autobiographical, it can be assumed that many of the primary issues faced by Esther were once faced by Plath and thus remained important issues to contend with within the scope of female existence at the time. Although the external economics of women had changed as called for by Gilman, allowing women to gain high levels of education and to find positions within the professional working world, not enough had yet changed to allow women, still raised within the economic mindset of women that they must depend upon men for their welfare, to escape these bonds on an internal level. The vast difference between intellectual and emotional understanding thus leads to the breakdown of Plath’s protagonist and suggests the titanic struggle faced by many women living during these trying times of transition. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. Small, Maynard & Company, 1898. (March 6, 2010) < http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/cpgilman/bl-cpgilman-womeneco-preface.htm> Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000. Read More