Message, Different Genres

Literature is a means by which people can raise questions about the society they live in and address issues of concern to them. One of the questioned often raised relates to the role of women in society. Female writers are able to use literature to express their opinions and explore what it means to be a woman in society. This was especially true in the times when women did not have the power and were not taken seriously enough to question their own roles openly. One text clearly describes the role of women saying that women were "supposedly the most stable of all elements of American nineteenth-century life, fixed firmly within their sphere of home and hearth" (The Literature of an Expanding Nation 21). When women are viewed this way, they are not capable of openly questioning their role or how they are viewed. Literature then becomes...
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