Throughout When We Dead Awaken, Rich brings up several of many historical periods where women began to equal out male and female roles in society and in literature. Ea

ch period was a breakthrough and yet another win for the feminist movement. During the 50’s and 60’s, rapid revelations and revolutions were made. There were “the sit-ins and marches in the South, the Bay of Pigs, and the early antiwar movement” (Rich 635). The duration of the time and tension of the atmosphere among all of these events, accumulating over time, easily leads to the mass feminist movement. It is during this revolutionary movement that the female worker and writer begin to be accepted into society and the literary realm. On page 634, Rich writes:

Because you still are beautiful, / though squared and stiffened by the pull / of what nine windy years have done. / You have three daughters, lost a son. / I see all your intelligence / flung into that unwearied stance.

Well, you are tougher than I thought. / Now when the wash with ice hangs taut / this morning of St. Valentine, / I see you strip the squeaking line, / your body weighed against the load, / and all my groans can do no good.

This is the second part of a poem written from the perspective of a man thinking of a woman he once loved, a decade after her wedding. From this poem we take out that in the 50’s middle class women are beginning to make careers on their own without the help of a male figure. In many cases women were working so that they could fund an education for their husband. From the poem, it is perceived that the man seems to resent having not followed his heart toward the woman he loved. The man is accepting of the fact that women can now make their own careers, and in this man, we see a beginning. The beginning is of the feminist movement. Rich eagerly awaits the day where women will all have the desire and ability to choose any profession they so desire. The problem according to Rich though, is that it has been several decades since the first feminists began, and there are still many prejudices and holds that are imposed upon women which keep equality from setting in.

“No male writer has written primarily or even largely for women, or with the sense of women’s criticism as a consideration when he chooses his materials, his theme, his language. But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even when, like Virginia

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