Women's Struggles Between Cultures

Women of all shapes, sizes, and colors have had to or still fight for their equality in society. In the stories of A Doll's House, The Awakening, and what I have read so far in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the women find themselves treated unfairly and wish for a call to action. One of the most interesting parts of analyzing these works are the differences between the women's approach towards equality depending on the author.

Henrik Ibsen, the author of A Doll's House, was one of the first to introduce an independent woman character. Nora, the protagonist, believes in her independence and leaves her household, believing that she will be able to start a new life on her own. The male author believed that if a woman was not happy in her relationship, she could simply leave and begin her life anew, which was not possible considering the society at the time. The book was published in 1879, a time where women were not readily accepted into high-paying jobs, if any at all. Henrik saw hope in the women's push for equality, which was not the same view as the female authors on the same subject.

Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening in the very late 1800s, just like Ibsen did with A Doll's House, but she had a very different approach. Edna realizes her state of identity and wishes for change to become a woman with a purpose that wasn't as a wife or a mother. As the novel comes to a close, however, Edna loses hope and drowns herself in the ocean. Chopin found that there was a spark of a revolution for women equality, but the society that they were living in  showed little hope in accepting this drastic change in the male-dominant world.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini begins with the story of a young Afghan girl by the name of Mariam. Mariam is told by her mother that men were not to be trusted and that women were only meant to endure. Mariam ignored her mother's requests to stay away from Jalil, but Mariam longed to spend time with her father. She discovered that he did not care to be seen in public with her and Mariam began to believe in her mother's words. Later, Mariam wed a much older man and began to love him due to what seems to be Stockholm Syndrome. Hosseini proves that we as a society believe that we are more modern in our belief of equality, so we find that other cultures with a hierarchy between men and women to be barbaric, but we are not completely "modern" oursleves.

I personally feel that we as a society have made a lot of progress since the time of Ibsen and Chopin, but we still have our issues. Women are still underpaid to the man's dollar and still objectified in all forms of media. If we want to achieve Ibsen's idea of women's independence, we as women have to fight for our equality and not give up until it is achieved.