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Discrimination In Pride And Prejudice

Decent Essays

When people think of gender discrimination, they probably think of things like wage gaps or one gender believing they are better than the other. Compared to the gender discrimination in the past, however, the discrimination today is not nearly as bad. American women were not allowed to vote until 1920. Many places viewed women as property or less important than men. Pride and Prejudice is set in a time where the latter examples of gender discrimination were common. To fully understand the book’s examples of gender discrimination, one must know what the social standards of its time period were. The first thing people would notice about Pride and Prejudice is the obsession with marriage. After all, the very first line in the book is “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). Marriage was very important to the English in this period of time for a few reasons, wealth and land being the main ones. Those two will be explained in more detail a little later. Outside of wealth, the main reason that females themselves would want to get married was because they were reliant on money that came from men, …show more content…

Outside of marrying and having children, women were expected to take care of the house, cook, and do laundry (Zelster). They would resort to gossiping to pass their time while not doing other things, something that was still the main source of entertainment for women during the 1930s, as shown in the book To Kill a Mockingbird. The women would spread rumors whether or not they were true. The women in Pride and Prejudice gossip very often, one of the better examples being before the first ball the Bingleys hold. “A report soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and seven gentlemen with him to the assembly” (Austen 6). This was simply a rumor that the women

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