Gender Roles In The 19th Century

There is an issue which has been the point of discussion and debate for ages. It has ebbed and flowed, and goes through bouts of excitement, and then recedes. It was heavily prominent in ages past, and starting in the 1900’s, issues started getting addressed. Even today, there are issues which appear to still affect roles and views of people. A difference between today’s issues and the ones from the 19th century is that at least today women have rights as citizens. 19th century England enforced debilitating gender roles on women which prevented them from being considered “real” citizens in society. There have been several issues and topics in conversation which depict how the gender roles society enforced hindered women. It was common for a series of questions to be asked reflecting the issues being faced. How should women be educated? What was their proper place in society? Should they be allowed to work
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a poet who made her voice heard. Browning looked up to Wollstonecraft and admired her work and how her book “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” explicitly stated how women were denied anything meaningful in society due to their lack of real education. As a woman poet, Browning was expected to write about love, emotions, pious religion, or nature. Instead, she wrote about political and social issues: war, slavery, controversy, power manipulation, and the fight for liberty. Several of Browning’s poems explored the nature of overpowering and women’s secondary roles in relationships. She used themes of betrayal, treachery, and loss in her poems, often ending them with the women dead or silenced as an allusion to society’s invisible hand. By the 1840’s, she was publishing works featuring women who were independent and went against society’s expectations. Browning was not the only female author who used her post as a medium to express her