Marriage

Marriage vs. Individuality The world believes in equal rights of men and women yet freedom of women is one of the biggest issue in our society as it has been for decades. This issue hasn’t only caused dispute in the past, when women weren’t able to work outside, or to go to school, but still exists today causing the divorce rate to incline rapidly. .Marriage is the legal bond that exits between two individuals. It may be in different form, but every society in every country practices some sort of marriage. One thing that is common universally in marriage is the fact that the women are left destitute of freedom. In the short stories,"Desiree's Baby" and "Cat in the Rain", the authors write about married women being deprived of their freedom, which still exists in the twenty first century. The main conflict that is portrayed in Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby”, is when the husband blamed his wife for their newly born baby’s skin color, even when he knew it was not the wife’s fault. Before marriage when father of the bride told the husband to be about the origin of his adopted daughter, he said “What did it matter about a name when he could give her one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana” (Chopin 116).But it did matter at the end, when they had a baby and the baby was of a different race and all the blame was put to the mother. Even though the husband was aware of the fact that his own mother was of mixed race and he had taken after her. I find this situation similar to the article that was published in the periodical Sex Roles “Eternal Mothers or Flexible Housewives' Middle-aged Chinese Married Women in Hong Kong” by Petula Sik-ying Ho. In her article, the writer talks about how in Hong Kong the wife of a teacher was called “nai”, which translates to “breast». But now this term is used for all housewives. The author also mentions, to my surprise, that in “Any “bad” or “inadequate” performance by the child is frequently attributable to the inability of the mother to take care of him/her”(250).This article was published only three years ago and surprisingly brought up the same issue Chopin mentioned in 1894.In the story, where the father was the proudest anyone can be of his baby boy and loved his wife dearly, only until he abandoned them and accused them of being from the same race as his slaves.