Woman's Special Enemy Analysis

that they need to remain clean and pure leaders. Rather than the men learn to control themselves and behave appropriately, it is apparently a duty placed on women to make men better. This just an indirect way of scapegoating women for an issue that is clearly the man’s own responsibility. Men being given higher status in society is much too common, and it can be seen in how women were referred to in this time period: “while the women whom they married and who accompanied them, are generally referred to as their ‘wives’, with their names very rarely mentioned”(24). This is a clear portrayal of women being under the direction and command of men, of them being an addition to men. Men receive the higher emphasis and attain higher status with women being viewed as having a sidekick role to men. Women were also considered “little more than an appendage to the work of their husbands”(24), again portraying them as attachments to men, not independent or whole. It is clear that the role of women in this era was seen as one that was less important to the man’s role and that they were only aids in a mission. Although many men may have considered them helpful and necessary to this mission to New Zealand, it is evident that they
Alana Jayne Piper’s article “‘Woman’s Special Enemy’: Female Enmity in Criminal Discourse during the Long Nineteenth Century” provides insight into this issue by describing familial roles of women in the 1800’s. She explains that “Even dangers that seemed to indicate clear culpability of male family members, such as incest, were laid at the door of maternal negligence”(Piper 7). This reveals the utter cowardice of some men to take responsibility for their own mistakes that were clearly their fault. It was easy for men to blame women for their own egregious mistakes since women have always been considered less intelligent and wise than