Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on the role of women in history.

Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on the role of women in history. Women have played a major role in history. They have been present in society as long as men, and yet have only been so recently, albeit slowly, being recognized and welcomed into the arms of equality in terms of how they are treated, and what their rights are as members of the changing world. The world used to be comprised of men, with women often being pushed to the background as partners, and often as just a few steps up the ladder from being mere objects. Women were the mothers and the sisters and the partners of many of the famous male figures throughout history, but have never really received the equality and rights that was needed for them to maximize their capacities as persons beyond the roles being allotted to them by tradition and culture.

The Yellow Wallpaper, which Gilman wrote during the 1890s, shows us a typical picture of the idealized woman as a figure moving within the private sphere of the home, while the man was both a private and a public figure. The woman was domesticated, functions preferably as a mother and as a wife, like the character portrayed in the story. The character was postpartum, and was worrying about her inability to perform her duties to both her husband, and her child. She was portrayed as incapacitated, but it would seem that this was because she knew of no other function than to bend to the will of society’s proclaimed master of her person, and that would be her husband.