The Feminist Movement Essay -- Gender Roles, New Women

The changes that occurred in gender relations at the spring up of the twentieth nose candy were a factor in the emergence of modernism. The origin wave of the Feminist Movement began during this period with the New Woman as its protagonist. The New Woman was a figure that was independent, relatively sexually turn and educated. Many women no longer lived their lives according to the Victorian ideal requisite for them and it became more acceptable for women to be seen unaccompanied outdoors and working in certain types of employment. The peeled woman was perceived as being a treat to men and after the First World War the freedom that women enjoyed received a repercussion as women were once again seat inside the home and were and were marginalised in the streets. In Jean Rhys Good morning time Midnight and Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort develop ar examples of women new women who were marginalised as soundly as women, who although lived in the modern embraced both new and old ge ndered traditions. give-and-take of modernity tended to focus on the city and opportunities for adventure and danger or pleasure which the metropolis offered to women. As women became more mobile from the nineteenth century onwards, their presence in the metropolis consisted of shopping expeditions or city outings. (Parkins 2001, p77)In Good Morning Midnight, Jean Rhys explores a claustrophobic kind of carry in the character of Sasha Jansen who has been send back to Paris at the spending of a friend as an alternative to her alcoholic amnesia in London. Sasha wanders through Paris aimlessly, the site of the dissolution of her man and wife and death of her son, arduous half heartedly to re-establish her life. Sasha is at a literal and emotional impasse at the beginning of the novel. ... ...ve her room by enticing her out of the Victorian demesne she lives in, into the Modern world by use of modern magazines offering new things. Aunt Ada emerges from her room dressed in leather clothe ready to travel by aeroplane to Paris. (Gibbons 2006, p 220) Although most of the characters problems are resolved by the traditional method of marriage, Cold Comfort Farm is not a reactionary novel in that it seeks to present marriage as the best or most suitable outcome for a young woman. Flora, at the end of the novel jets off to be unify to her cousin Charles. Traditionally marriage was considered as being the most suitable outcome for a young woman. Instead, the author positions within the novel modern debates concerning the nature of marriage and alerts the reader to the social constructions of femininity in the 1930s. (Horner & Zlosnik 2002, p 170).