"Discuss the views of women in pre 1914 England with reference to two poems written in this period.
In England before 1914 women's write were very limited. I will explore this through two poems by Thomas Hardy and Walt Whitman the poems being The Ruined Maid' and To a Common Prostitute' respectively. Both poems are found in the IGCSE poetry anthology (Poetry written before 1914). I will begin by looking at the historical fact behind this idea, then looking at each poem and then looking at how the poems support this idea.
In Victorian times, there was a great struggle between two groups the; women's rights or Suffragette' movement whose main objective was to get women the right to vote, and the opposing party, which was one made up of men whose view's were the opposite. They argued that women were too pure to be integrated into the grisly' world of British politics. Before then, in Elizabethan England, women's rights were not seriously considered. Women were seen to be inferior to men by a long way and were treated almost as slaves, just used for decoration, cooking and bearing children. These ideas must be considered when you think of the poems, because if the social norm was that women's rights were ignored like this then surely the poets would not have wanted to stray too far from this.
The first poem I shall discuss is "The Ruined maid- by Thomas Hardy written in 1901. It is written through the eyes of a lower class' woman whose name is not mentioned but she has come across a friend from her past who has come into quite considerable wealth. Her name is Melia. The woman who is talking is shocked and amazed at how this woman, who obviously was a part of her social class' but has now through her own ruin', managed to climb the social ladder and is now higher class', Melia's friend is in awe of her fussing over every detail of her appearance. .
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three' [ln 7].
One can constantly spot his eyes wandering to a woman's breasts or rear, he spends a whole scene staring at scantily clad women by a pool and talking about their bodies, and he even perverts the baptism of his attractive maid into a romantic sexual fantasy. ... She then runs away and begins to cry claiming almost as if screaming to the film industry itself, "You've ruined me!...