The Role of Women and Its Depiction in Shakespeare’s Othello

Today, discrimination against women is now being fought to give them the same rights as what the men are experiencing. For the longest time, there is a popular mindset that women should remain as housewives and be in-charge of the domestic aspects of the family such as cleaning the house, cooking dinner, taking care of the kids and performing other tasks around the house. Although there had been moves to debunk this ideology, there are still other cultures and societies that are conservative to the role of women, that their role is confined in the four corners of their house.

For the Westerners, women are being liberalized from this discrimination. They are becoming more open minded about that fact that women should not be confined as housewives and that they should be given the opportunity to become career women. But for the Orientals, the idea of women becoming more than housewives is rather neglected than embraced. Although there has been a strong move to debunk this mindset, most cultures of the Oriental society are confined to this thinking.

For them, it is still the men who should be the one in-charge for providing the family the things that it needs. It is their job and not that of the women. In some parts of the world, little has changed with regards to their outlook on the role of women. Little has changed in the role of women in their society since the 15th century. According to Answers. com, as women have in all the cultures of the globe, they are half of the communities of the early years of modern Europe and the occurrences of their lives were nearly as changing as those for the male population.

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Moreover, Answers.com states that women have experiences differentiated, “according to social class, geographic location, religious affiliation, ethnicity, and rural or urban setting. ”

These varying experiences by women are not to be misconstrued as them being liberated. Their varied experiences are still marginalized by the fact that they are living in a male-dominated society. As stated in Answers. com, “Despite this variety, however, all women in Europe lived in a society that regarded women as inferior to men. ” This has led cultures and societies into believing that the only role of women at that time is just to be housewives.

Their only role in society is to take care of the house and her sons and daughters and that they would not worth to anything more than this. This mindset has deprived the women population some civil liberties that men are experiencing. It includes their non-participation in electoral process wherein they were not given the opportunity to be elected nor to elect as they are deprived of the right to vote. With regards to family relationships, they are treated as possessions by their fathers in a way that the daughters have no say on who they should marry.

It is their fathers who would be the one to have the right to chose to whom are his daughters to marry. Once married, the women are expected to serve their husbands with all of their hearts and soul. Unfaithfulness is not an option for the women as the society is more judgmental and condemnatory if women are judged. The legal system has a disparity over equal rights. It is more acceptable for a man to be polygamous than a woman to be polyandrous. Severe punishments are vested for woman violators of the law. In terms of inheritance patterns, the women usually do not have any right to inheritance.

It the sons, specially the first born son, and not the daughters who inherit the properties and possessions left by their parents. They are also looked down as someone who would be able to have knowledge about religious doctrines and institutions. Their presence was marginalized and they were perceived as someone whose worth would not amount to anything more than servants in religious institutions. They are also deprived of the right to have a proper education as opportunities for them to grow and acquire knowledge in educational institutions was taken away form them.

Again, the male-dominated society has imposed this mindset thinking that women are inferior to them. To conclude, the social structure of those times has confined women into having the role of just becoming housewives and nothing more. Even during those times, there has been a struggle to overturn the discriminatory perception about the role of women. Moderata Fonte has written a book entitled The Worth of Women in 1600 to defy the current perceptions about women during those times. As quoted from the book series edited by King and Rabil, Jr. in 1996 entitled The Other Voice in Early.