Essay Questions

What is the main idea transmitted through the poem "To the Indifferent Women’’?

In the poem mentioned above, the narrator criticizes the women who chose to stay inside their homes, to coddle their family members and thus the women who chose to ignore the problems the rest of the world faces. Gilman's narrator is ruthless when talking about these women and sees them as being good for nothing. The safety mentioned in the poem is the safety given by the compliance to social norms. The women criticized here are not those who seek a good life, but those who refuse to acknowledge there are problems in the world and thus perpetuate the problem. These women are criticized by the narrator who believes all women are responsible for the well-being of all the women in the world.

Explain the ending of the poem entitled "Locked Inside’’.

At the end of the poem, the female protagonist of the story finds that the room she was locked inside was locked from inside and thus she had the power to open the door if she wanted to. The woman in the poem is portrayed like in many other poems by the author as being suppressed by society and thus somehow limited as a result. However, what the narrator suggests through the ending of the poem is that women have the power to free themselves if they want to.

How does the narrator explain the expression "boys will be boys’’?

The expression "boys will be boys’’ is the tile used by the author for one of her poems and she explains in the poem the way boys behave and why they think their way of behaving is totally normal. The narrator alludes towards the idea that the expression was used to normalize certain behaviors boys had and as a result they are no longer seen as something negative. Instead, they are seen as the natural manifestation of a boy. The narrator highlights how this practice is a damaging one because it can make boys behave in a way they should not and makes them believe that it is alright to do so.