Kate Chopin Was Born in

Kate Chopin was born in a well-known family on February 8, 1850. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was an Irish immigrant and her mother, Eliza Faris O'Flaherty was a descendent of one of the most aristocratic Creole families in the St. Louis. Chopin attended a Catholic school and was "exposed to Catholic teachings and a French educational emphasis upon intellectual discipline" (Inge). She married Oscar Chopin in 1870. Oscar owned and operated a cotton plantation and on her honeymoon, she met two women that would influence her writing immensely.

Victoria Woodhull was one of those women and she had a reputation for being a "radical-feminist publisher, stockbroker, spiritualist, and future nominee for president" (Inge). She encouraged Chopin to not "fall into the useless degrading life of most married ladies'" (Inge). Chopin too this advice to heart and while she did care for her six children and her husband, she managed to "reconcile the needs of her own being with the expectations of her conventional milieu.

She dressed unconventionally and smoked cigarettes long before smoking was an approved practice among women in her class" (Inge). While Chopin generally avoided women's right's movements and organizations because she thought their aims were "unrealistic," (Seyersted), she did adopt the theory that women deserved the same rights as men because they had the "same drives as man" (Seyersted). Chopin's husband died of swamp fever, leaving Chopin to run the household. She started living with her mother, who died shortly after she moved in.

Chopin's doctor, Frederick Kolbenheyer, was a "man of broad learning and radical ideas" (Inge), urged Chopin to write. She lacked confidence and it "took several years of encouragement from her friends as well as a.