TOW #7: "It's a Woman's World'

Eavan Boland, born in 1944, is a Irish poet and writer whose work deals with Irish culture, politics, and religion, as well as relationships between the sexes and women. She has been active as a writer since the 1960s, a time where many people began acknowledging the merits of women's rights movements. Second-wave feminism, as it is now called, got its start in the early 1960s in the United States and much of the Western world.

Boland's argument in her poem "It's a Woman's World", written in 1982, connects to how feminism is perceived and interpreted in society. It takes traditional roles of women and juxtaposes them with those of men in an attempt to show readers the disparity between the two. Through lines like "So when the king's head / gored its basket-- / grim harvest-- / we were gristing bread", Boland contrasts the two expected roles in history. It is clear she feels as though women are not, and have not been, treated equally in their 'assigned' roles and expectations.

However, through her use of harsh, almost violent diction in this stanza, it could also be interpreted differently. "Gristing" is a very harsh word used to describe the action of grinding meal or flour for bread. Her use of alliteration highlights these similarities, in the use of words like "gored", "grim" and "gristing" in succession to compare each of the actions' violent nature.

Boland also makes the argument that women's important roles have typically been overlooked in society, in her lines "who milestone / our lives / with oversights-- / living by the lights / of the loaf left / by the cash register". These lines stood out to me, because it highlights how oftentimes the work women do goes unnoticed by others until they do something wrong (like forgetting a loaf of bread or leaving the wash wet). I believe Boland makes the argument in these lines that domestic work is just as important, and not valued as much as it should be by society.

Overall, Boland's arguments leave much to be discussed about the way women are perceived and have historically been perceived. The differences in the viewpoint she is coming from in the 1980s and perhaps the viewpoint of 2016, when we have a woman running for president, are also an important point to note. Perhaps it is becoming a woman's world after all.