What is a Woman?

            What are the key qualities and characteristics that make up a woman? There are many ideas and opinions that people believe women should and should not be, according to 17th-19th century ideas. All of these notions have brought on many debates and arguments for hundreds of years on what exactly is a woman. How women behave, their roles in society, their roles in a marriage, what types of freedom they have, how they spend their time, the education they receive, and many other things have been debated for hundreds of years. The constant battle between what is equal, what is fair, and what is right was a struggle for women because of the simple fact that they are female. They were denied basic human rights and freedoms that men received with ease because it was believed that women meant nothing more than a means to an end in the lives of men and as their role in the household. This resulted in hundreds of years of oppression and dissatisfaction of women because they were not treated as human beings with equal rights of men. They were denied simple freedoms and made to believe that their worth was to please men and maintain a household. The suppression of women through marriage, lack of education, and how they were raised to act and expected to behave all created a monster of depravity and corruption that was expressed time and time again by and through different people of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. .
             Women back in the 17th-19th centuries were raised in a manner that is very shocking to how females are raised in the present day. Women were raised to need dependence from a man and that all they needed to rely on to gain a husband was their looks and a flimsy personality. It was not expected or welcome of women to act in an educated or well-behaved manner; that would serve as a threat to men who would view them as unattractive and not worthy to marry. The common characteristics of what was expected of a woman hundreds of years ago was someone who acted as if they had no cares, uneducated, dependent, and only cared for the petty things of life.