Are Pat Barker's Union Street and Beatrix Campbell's Wigan Pier Revisited the Same Text?

Union Street by Alice Barker is a novel about different stages in women’s lives. It starts out with a young girl who gets raped and ends with a dying old lady on a park bench. We get to follow the women through their problems such as bad marriages, money problems and getting old. The novel is written in the 1980’s and is set in the poorer parts of London. This essay is going to discuss if this novel is the same text as Wigan Pier Revisited, which is a text about poverty and politics in the 80’s where the biggest losers are the women. It is going to look into three areas that is the bigger part of a woman’s life at this time and place. This essay is going to examine following features, marriage, money and the problems that comes with getting old.

In Union street most of the women are “forced” to get married to men they do not love. Mostly because they are pregnant but also because they feel like they have to get married to make it into a better life style. In most cases this ends with a disaster, where the women are abused and supposed to stay at home to take care of the children and the household, not to work. In Wi

gan Pier revisited we can read about how the women are beginning to take back their power from the men. About how they do not accept that they are abused and they can manage to take care of themselves, and do not necessarily have to get married just because they are pregnant. Here we can see a big difference between the two texts, in Union Street it would almost be catastrophe to be pregnant and not married, while it is not in Wigan’s Pier Revisited. In Wigan’s Pier Revisited the young girls often get pregnant on purpose because they have nothing else to do, to get out of their parents house or because they want to feel more grown up. Most of the teenagers that get pregnant stay at their parent’s home if they do not get married or get an apartment from the state.

Women are often dependent on their men, in Union Street most of the women are working at home taking care of the household. Because of this they are dependent on the men to bring home money to pay for food and rent. Since it is the men that bring home the money, they decide how much the women should have and therefore they seldom get to buy something for themselves. In Wigan’s Pier Revisited the single teenage mothers have to work herself but since there is a lack of childcare facilities she has to have someone else that takes care of the baby or she cannot go to work. Another thing that makes it even harder for her is that she cannot make “too much” money because then it will be drawn from

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