Using Satire to Create Awareness of Gender Roles: Egalia's Daughters

Egalia’s Daughters and “Sultana’s Dream” both portray examples of what it would be like to have gender roles reversed in societies. They both criticize gender roles and show people how gender discrimination leaves the submissive gender in suppressed conditions. Poking fun at gender role reversal was one way these books helped in educating the readers. “Sultana’s Dream” has a time of setting of the early twentieth century. The author of Egalia’s Daughters is Gerd Brantenberg, born on October 27th, 1941 and is presently still alive. She was born in Oslo but grew up in Fredrikstad which is the largest city in Norway. Some of her greatest accomplishments are establishing women’s shelters, working in lesbian movements, in 1978 she created a literary Women’s Forum, her drive being to encourage all women to write and publish, and lastly she has also published ten novels and two plays. In 1983 she was awarded the Mads Wiel Nygaards Endowment. Rokeya Hossain was born in 1880 and died on December 9th, 1932. She was born into a Bengali Muslim upper-class family in the village of Pairaband. Her main accomplishments were establishing the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School in 1909, in 1916 she founded the Anjuman-e-Khawatin-e-Islam, and even though English was her 5th language she still wrote a book in English to show her proficiency in English to her husband. In Gerd Brantenberg’s novel she clearly shows that in her society women were put on the back burner just like the men were in her novel. Gerd was born back when women had very little rights. She lived during a time where women were stepping up and rallying against the fact that they were not allowed certain rights that men were allowed and this showed in her book. For example in Egalia’s Daughters the guys or the “menwim” have the “burning of the pehos” along with other “masculist activities.”1
In Rokeya Hossain’s short story she is trying to relate to her readers about the inequality of her society and the dominance of