What did Jane Austen do for women?

Answer 1

She was a strong woman, who wrote simply because she loved to, which influences women all over the world to write. Her appearance was said to be of an 'average' look. Because of this, people said that she was not beautiful enough to be a writer. Her language was vivid, and her dialogue fantastic. She did not focus on the appearance of herself OR her characters, which, to this day, is an enlightening fact.

Answer 2

Jane Austen's work helped to create opportunities for women to be recognized as talented writers and to challenge traditional gender roles. Through her novels, she offered complex female characters who stood up to societal expectations and pursued their own desires. Austen's writing also provided a voice for women's perspectives and experiences in a male-dominated literary landscape.

Answer 3

Jane Austen raised point on women's rights, and she did it in a way that was both subtle and compelling. The subtlety lay in the fact that she never moralized or complained in her writings, she merely illustrated the problems without comment in ways that her readers could sympathize with.

The situation at her time was that women of her class, including both the middle class and gentry, did not get jobs. Aside from a single type of employment, they were not educated for jobs, and no jobs were available for them. This meant that they either had to marry or they had to resign themselves to being dependent on others in their families, unless they had money of their own.

Women with money were objects of prey by fortune hunters, who would marry for their money. This problem was legally sanctioned by the fact that the money belonging to unmarried women passed into the possession of their husbands when they married. They could only get it back if they were granted divorces, which almost never happened, and was not even mentioned in Jane Austen's writing.

The exceptional employment was a job as governess, which was normally only given to educated and refined women who had no other means of support - who did not marry and had no families or money of their own. In Emma, Jane Farifax, who seems only to have a job of governess as a possibility, regards the work as analogous to slavery. She is beautiful, talented, intelligent, well educated, and generally charming. But the people around her all seem to think she can only be a governess because she is a penniless orphan. There is one man who loves her, but he is on the brink of giving up on her because he knows he will be disowned by his wealthy step parents if he marries her, because of her poverty.

The problem of finding a husband was exacerbated by the fact that at the time of most of Jane Austen's novels, her country was engaged in a war that drained 25% to 40% of the young men away, so eligible young men were few and far between (there were never enough men at the ball). Competition was so fierce that people, both men and women, were judged as potential partners on the basis of their incomes, as was done often in Jane Austen's writings.

Her books, which were primarily compelling because they were romantic and often very funny, were also socially insightful in a way that was very seductive. In fact, the Prince of Wales, who became King George IV, let it be known, through whatever indirect means he had, that he would like her to dedicate a book to him. Her insights were influential at the highest levels of the court.

It is hard to judge what her efforts did for women's rights. In fact, it is easy to read her work and forget all this. And perhaps that is why the work is so much a permanent fixture in English Literature.