Purse Snatching

06 March 2013 Victorian Era In a Victorian marriage, a husband dominates his wife. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of An Hour” Louise Mallard contemplates the significance of the news that her husband had been killed in a train wreck. Chopin creates Louise in order to protest how wife was oppressed in marriage and her works suggest that Louise was oppressed psychologically, politically and economically. In the patriarchal world of the nineteenth century women were oppressed psychologically. “There would be no powerful will bending hers”, described by Kate Chopin. Also known as “Victorian Era”, which was the period of Queen Victoria’s reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901, the 19th century was a period when Women’s Rights was not making much account. In this time women only future was to be married and have children, and some marriages were loveless ones. In this era women were molded into an ideal form from birth, with direction as to how they should speak, act and dress. Every aspect of their lives was controlled by a male authority figure, starting with their own father at birth and persisting through early womanhood into marriage where it was the husband who possessed control. Men believed that it was the law of the bible for one of the two parties to be superior and the other inferior. Women were ruled over as children and were to be seen, but not heard. In that time, individual women publicly expressed their desire for equality but it was not until 1848 that a handful of reformers in Seneca Falls, NY, called “A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman”. But despite all campaign for human’s equality, women were publicly oppressed in this Era. Women in Victorian Age America, also couldn’t exercise their citizenship. “She said it over and over under her breath free, free, free!” quote Kate Chopin. Women so-called the minority gender at this period were oppressed for any participation on