Gender as a social construction
Write a focused and developed 3-5-page essay.
Use the assigned literature by Jewett, Freeman, and/or Dunbar Nelson and discuss how the writers you choose examine gender as a social construction, role reversal and/or power inequity based on gender privilege, gender “rights,” social conventions associated with the institution of marriage, intersectionality, and/or the cost of a woman rebelling against patriarchal structures/rules, etc. Limit your discussion to only one or two stories.
Sample Solution
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was both a talented educator and thought-provoking writer, but she was also an accomplished reader. The three reading journals she kept intermittently between the years of 1906 and 1932 document her accomplishments as a reader in extraordinarily granular terms. As a whole, just as Dunbar-Nelson’s diary offers us a comparatively unabashed and unadulterated look into the life of an early twentieth century woman of color, her reading journals perform a parallel function in providing evidence for what she would have been reading during the period. n contemporary explorations of her first published book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), it is all too easy for us to gloss over her review for Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862). If we pay closer attention to this review, we encounter a woman well versed in a conventionally Western literary education.
