Lotteries and Women's Rights

             Author's Note: This piece acknowledges conceptions of women's rights early in the nineteenth century secretly placed in world renown short stories by famous authors. It explains what it was like to be a woman then and what it was like and what it should have been like.        
             If you were to speak, wouldn’t you want somebody to listen to you? Or even do something for yourself, on your own? Everybody wants to be able to say what they want to say without criticism or being laughed at. Maybe, even have someone to at least listen to what you have to say. Women have always had a hard time speaking their mind or doing things for themselves because of the way they we taught and later treated like so. “The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson, expresses the difficulty of doing what every woman should be able to do: live her life.

            Once a year, a lottery takes place in a small little town and some other surrounding towns. When the lottery comes around you would think that everyone would be excited and cheerful to win money. However, this is not like any other lottery you have ever heard of before. People gather in the town anxious and nervous waiting for the rest of the people to pick their paper. Instead of just anyone from the family to go and pick their slip, it has to be the man of the family. One example is when Mr. Dunbar is unable to attend since is leg is broken, and so Mrs. Dunbar is to pick the slip for their family. Mr. Summers, the leader of the town, along with a couple of other men argue whether or not she should do it. They would volunteer her son, but since he is not of age, he cannot. What is wrong with a woman picking? Nothing bad is going to happen when she picks the paper; it isn’t going to burn down the town, so get over it.

            Though Mrs. Dunbar ends up picking it for her family, the way Mrs. Hutchinson is treated far exceeds that. One of the most striking is when the Hutchinson family picks from the box and they win, Mrs. Hutchinson cries out that it is not fair that they got picked, but no one will listen to her, telling her to shut up. No matter if you are a woman or a man, you should never tell someone to shut up. What if it is important or life saving, as it is in this story? Similar to that situation, Mrs. Hutchinson is picked from her family. As I said earlier, this is not your typical lottery, she is to go into the center of town and get stoned to death. She screams for someone to help her, someone to stand up and say this is not right. Stoning someone to death? That goes against all the civilized rights we have as a human being. This shades the fact that they are not doing this to just anyone, they are doing this to a woman.

            Not being heard is one thing, but when you are being almost brainwashed to say and believe something that isn’t true is even more appalling. “Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, eerily plays on the mind of a woman with no standard mind of her own. It relates to “The Lottery” because of the verbal abuse that can manipulate a woman though they may think it to be normal. Since her husband is a man and a doctor, he creates an illusion in her mind that she supposedly has a case similar to depression. He tells her she needs to be locked away in the barred-in attic, and to be taking medicine that makes her see people made of the wallpaper in her room. Doesn’t that just seem the least bit suspicious? She thinks it is normal to be locked away from her baby which is what housewives are thought to do. He is molding her into someone that is not that he can train to be loyal; almost like a dog.  Dogs are easy to manipulate, but women are not dogs and should not be treated like one.

While manipulating is an illusion that is hidden, abuse can be following right behind it. One instance is when Mr. Hutchinson grabs the paper out of his wife's hands. He didn’t ask for it. He didn’t lightly take it from her hands. Mr. Hutchinson snatched it from her like it was a weapon she was going to use to kill him. A woman should be able do to things for herself and be treated as if she was one of the guys. So, if you want us to care for your children and clean the house, then give us some sort of gracious respect. If we wanted you to take it, we would have offered. I bet Mr. Hutchinson thought it was the right thing to treat a woman that way, but that is naive if he thought that way. Women deserve respect and I wish other women in this story would speak up and realize that the whole situation is horrific.

Whereas Mrs. Hutchinson is only mistreated ever so slightly, Minny, a character in “The Help” is physically beaten weekly by her drunken husband. “The Help” is based on the lives of black maids in the 1960’s. It doesn’t mean only the way white people acted towards them, but also what their home lives were like too. Minny works as a maid full time during the day, cleaning up houses for women that can do it themselves. Then she goes home to five children and cleans her own house. That isn’t even the worst of it, her husband, after work comes home drunk and mad, and Minny ends up with bruises and blood all over her from him hitting her. She can’t do anything to leave him because of the kids and she can’t support all five on her own. The abuse towards Mrs. Hutchinson may be minor compared to the way Minny is abused by her husband, but it still does not make it okay.

In order for there not to be any women’s rights in the “The Lottery”, or for any of the other stories, there must have been some sort of point in the author’s life for her to put this in her story. Throughout Shirley Jackson’s life, she suffered from off and on depression and couldn’t focus enough to stay in college the full time (Shirley Jackson Biography ). Many of her stories included this sort of tragic mood between psychological and family issues. Since Jackson lived in a time where women did not have rights, my theory is that she turned it into something dark to meet her level of depression.  

Women have rights that should have been in place centuries ago keeping men from treating them with disregard. Mrs. Hutchinson, Minny, and the other lady all have had their lives taken from them in one way or another. None of them ever deserved to be treated the way they did and neither should you ever be. Women’s rights were put in place to help women be who they wanted to be without any significant direction, so let’s keep it that way. "I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of a man, but must be taught to protect herself and there I take my stand." –By Susan B. Anthony