Women In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Females have been treated unfairly throughout history. In the past, women were not able to speak unless told they could by their husbands, and more recently, they have faced different pay scales than men in the same job field. Due to perseverance and progressive ideas, women have more rights in the twenty-first century than ever before in history, but there were numerous women before who did not have access to the same freedoms of women today. What did they wish for the most? The Wife of Bath had monumental ideas for the answer to that question. She is one of the iconic characters in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Like a majority of the characters, she comes bearing a tale for the journey. Throughout The Wife of Bath’s Tale, the theme that “power needs to be given to women” is seen through the Wife’s perspective, the Knight’s conflict, and the old woman’s lesson.
Chaucer depicts the Wife as a strong, outspoken woman. With this in mind, she is not the stereotypical woman of the time the The Canterbury Tales would have been written. The Wife says she has been the “whip” in her relationships (line 12). By this she means she has held the power over her husbands. She does not hold back anything that she wants men to know and is forthright
In today’s world, a woman can do anything a man can do thanks to progressive people that seen the exchange of power as a positive aspect. Women wish to have power just as much as men do. They might even want it more due to the fact that men have repeatedly had the upper hand, but women fought for it. The Wife of Bath was a woman ahead of her time, and she is a reflection of Chaucer’s ideas of the women of the Middle Ages. Truly, the Wife of Bath was a woman in a man’s world (and