PUBLISHED WRITING 3 - "Martin Luther King Said...."

 

 

Martin Luther King’s saying "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed" conveys a message that advices us not to be passive. We must take actions on our own to gain what we want. The oppressor will suddenly not do what you want because it is the right thing to do. We should actively seek our rights. Throughout the ages women have always been victims of oppression, mostly by men. This is because of the traditional gender roles which cast men as the superior one. Until recent times, women throughout Asia and the Middle East were unable to have any influence over the political, religious or cultural lines of their society.

Now the status of women all over the world has been raised significantly but still in some countries oppression continues. For example in many Middle Eastern countries women effectively live as prisoners, unable to leave the house except under the guardianship of a male guardian. There are many Saudi Arabian women who have only left their houses a handful of times in their whole life. The oppression of women is largely from men's desire for power and control. In ancient Assyria, the punishment for rape was the handing over of the rapist’s wife to the husband of his victim to use her as he desired. Most of all, some cultures practiced a system called widow murder, where women would be killed shortly after the deaths of their husbands. This was common throughout India and China until twentieth century, and there are still occasional cases nowadays.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The yellow wallpaper” is about the male oppression of women in a monopolistic society. In this story the author tells us about the women's struggle with physical and mental confinement. The narrator in this story is a submissive woman who is oppressed by her husband. The conflict in this story is the struggle of Jane against her husband. She was taken to a house in the woods and virtually locked in the second floor thinking that she is suffering from mental disease. She also tried to convince John to let her visit cousin Henry and Julia but her argument failed. John did not allow her to assume the role of a mature individual in charge of her own life. She is fortunate to fail every time when she attempts to make a point against him. At the end she tears all the yellow wallpaper off the walls. She is sure John will have something to say about this, but she is not bothered. The narrator distances herself from John and controls him when she say, "Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall so that I had to creep over him every time". She no longer worried about what John thinks. She has come to a point where she has had enough and take matters into her own hands. Finally at the end narrator follows Martin Luther King's words. Her freedom is not voluntarily given by her husband. She demanded and worked towards that to gain it.