Women's Roles in 19th–20th Century Literature vs. Today

Introduction: Women's Roles Then and Now

In the 21st century, though it is still widely believed and expected by many that women will marry and have children, it is no longer assumed — as it was in the 19th century, and arguably throughout most of the 20th century — that marriage and motherhood will be women's dominant or only sources of fulfillment. Instead, women today are encouraged, and in many cases expected, to have careers outside the home, often while still tending to their households, supporting husbands, and raising families. Women now also have far more choices about which roles to fulfill. Some women still embrace traditional roles; some fulfill a few but not all of them; and others reject traditional roles entirely. A key difference between women's roles yesterday and today is that today's women are freer to choose, with less stigma attached to unconventional or non-conforming paths — such as police work, firefighting, or construction work, or choosing not to marry and/or have children. There are therefore far fewer prescribed guidelines for women to follow than in the past; today, more than ever, it is up to the individual woman to decide what sort of life she wishes to live.

Some changes in typical attitudes about women's roles can be attributed to the effects of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Others may be mainly economically driven: for example, it is much harder today than in the past to live comfortably and raise a family on a single income. Most women who work nowadays do so out of necessity; working outside the home is still not every woman's first choice, but many women — single mothers, for example — have no choice at all. Working, rather than staying home and raising a family, has become the new norm for women of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This is a reality far different from that represented by authors like Henrik Ibsen in Hedda Gabler, Kate Chopin in "A Pair of Silk Stockings" and "The Story of an Hour," and Virginia Woolf in the section of her A Room of One's Own often subtitled "Shakespeare's Sister." Today's world for women is radically different from anything Ibsen's miserable and frustrated Hedda Gabler, Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, or any of Kate Chopin's female characters would have known. In fact, those characters would likely have felt more at home, less lonely and despairing, and less internally conflicted in the present day than in the worlds their respective authors created for them.

This essay examines each of these works in relation to life for women today and life for women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when these three authors created their respective unhappy, angst-ridden female characters.

Hedda Gabler and the Trap of 19th-Century Convention

In Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1890), the play — set in the Norwegian capital of Oslo — opens with 29-year-old Hedda (very late to marry by the standards of the time) just returning with her husband, George Tesman, from a long honeymoon. George has spent that entire time researching a dull-sounding project on the Middle Ages. Not only is Hedda bored by Tesman's tedious ways and interests, but she is also newly pregnant, which makes her almost unbearably unhappy. Tesman is proud of Hedda's pregnancy, yet Hedda resents it, or even any mention of it: "I am exactly as I was when I started [the honeymoon]," Hedda lies insistently to Tesman's aunt (162), and when Tesman hints shortly afterward to Judge Brack about the pregnancy, she tells her husband, "Oh do leave me alone" (172) and changes the subject.

Ibsen's portrait of Hedda contrasts sharply with period views about women's roles. Typically, 19th-century women like Hedda were expected to be delighted and fulfilled by marriage and motherhood, to share their husbands' interests, and to encourage their husbands' careers while desiring none of their own. Hedda, however, is not a typical 19th-century woman. She would, in fact, have been more at home in today's world, where women commonly marry in their 30s or later — or not at all — pursue careers, and choose whether or not to have children. In Ibsen's time it would have been out of the question for Hedda to divorce Tesman, terminate her pregnancy, or seek her own career; yet those options, had they been available — even one or two of them — might arguably have prevented her suicide at the end of the play.

Hedda's lack of conventional feminine interests contrasts with the more traditional ones of her former schoolmate, Thea Elvestead, who visits early in the play to announce the recent publication of a book by her paramour — and, as it turns out, Tesman's career rival — Eilert Lovborg. Though Thea's adultery with Lovborg is atypical, her role in his life as helper and supporter of the man and his work is entirely conventional. Hedda, by contrast, had her own earlier chance for a relationship with Lovborg but wished not so much to be with him as to be like him: independent and creative, with meaningful work and a life of her own.

Instead, at the end of the play, Hedda is married to and pregnant by a man she does not love, blackmailed and trapped by Judge Brack, and despairing of her future. She ends her life with one of her father's pistols — taking the only symbol of typically masculine power readily available to her into her own hands. Brack's closing words — "Good God! — people don't do such things" (221) — underscore the fact that Hedda has at last escaped all the stultifying conventions of her day, but only by rebelling against them with the ultimate act of violence against herself.

Kate Chopin and the Sacrifices of Married Life

In the brief short story "A Pair of Silk Stockings" (1897), American author Kate Chopin, though Ibsen's contemporary, approximates far more closely than he does what married life might have been like for women with children in the 1890s — and what it is still like for many women in the 21st century, in terms of the expectations placed on them and the sacrifices they make for others. At the story's opening, Mrs. Sommers comes into an unexpected fifteen dollars (roughly $150 today) and thinks at first that it should "be added to the price . . . for Janie's shoes . . . new shirtwaists for the boys . . . caps for the boys and sailor hats for the girls" (Chopin 1). But after much initial hesitation, she buys herself a pair of silk stockings (1–2), then a pair of fitted gloves (2–3), an elegant lunch out (3), and a theater matinee. At the end of the day, returning home by cable car, Mrs. Sommers — accustomed as she is to placing her family's needs first — has so thoroughly enjoyed her rare day of self-indulgence that she wishes she might never have to get off the cable car and go home (4).

This story reflects not only married and family life in the 1890s but also the domestic reality many women still recognize today: married women with children often place their own wants and needs behind those of other family members, yet feel a delicious sense of freedom on the rare occasions when they do not. Mrs. Sommers is wistful at the prospect of returning home, but unlike Hedda Gabler, she has no intention of killing herself.

Conclusion: Literary Limitations and Contemporary Freedom

Had Judith Shakespeare somehow escaped her arranged marriage at age 15 or 16 — an unlikely prospect — and run off to seek fame and fortune as her brother William was free to do, she would have encountered social resistance that made her dream impossible, even though "She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theater" (1381). When she stood at the stage door and announced that she wanted to act, "Men guffawed in her face" (1381). To survive day to day, Judith would have needed to find a man to house, feed, clothe, and otherwise support her, and might have been driven to prostitution. In either case she would have faced the constant possibility of pregnancy, which would have ended whatever acting career she might have managed, once and for all (1381–83). Ultimately, according to Woolf, Judith Shakespeare — like Hedda Gabler — would very likely have taken her own life (1382).

Although life today is still far from perfect for many women in many parts of the world, and while some women in poorer regions of Africa, Latin America, and Asia continue to face attitudes and obstacles similar to those Judith Shakespeare would have encountered, women in the United States, Europe, and many other areas today are infinitely freer than Woolf's Judith Shakespeare would have been to pursue artistic or other careers, to support themselves while doing so, and to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Henrik Ibsen, Kate Chopin, and Virginia Woolf — all writing in either the late 19th or early 20th centuries — depict, in the works discussed here, various strictures and limitations on the lives and aspirations of women during those times. For women today there are both similarities to and differences from the lives these three authors portrayed. However, for women in the European and American societies within which these works were written, there is now considerably more autonomy and choice. Unlike the worlds inhabited by Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Sommers, and the imaginary Judith Shakespeare, today's world — at least in those regions — allows women to resist, reject, or accept some, all, or none of the traditional roles depicted within these three literary works, largely on their own terms.

Chopin, Kate. "A Pair of Silk Stockings." Electronic Text Center, University Library. December 13, 2004. 4 pages.

Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. Henrik Ibsen: Four Major Plays. Ed. John Grube. New York: Airmont, 1966. 153–221.

Woolf, Virginia. From A Room of One's Own [Shakespeare's Sister]. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985. 1376–83.