Letter To My Mom (:

about "A Women's World" by Eavan Boland

September 14, 2011

Dear Mom,

It has been a good couple of weeks at school now; I’m really focused, and really enjoy all my classes, especially my English class. We already started doing some reading. The first piece that we have read is called “A Women’s World” by Eavan Boland, and it was such a great poem. My class and broke it down to understand it better. We got a lot off of it.

So far, what I’ve understood about this poem is that it is more than just any poem, it has a huge, important point and message behind it. That is why I was so glad that we, as a class got to discuss it thoroughly. The author, Boland, She discusses the argument of women being treated unequal compare to men, and not being able to be given that opportunity to achieve and be successful like men have. In lines 27-28 it says, “We were never on the scene of the crime”, to our society or even the world. Because they never have and if things don’t change they probably will never leave behind those statistics, and stereotypes that our society throws at us, as women.

Mom, is it me or don’t you just agree with me. For example, in our culture, women are seen as being good for “only” one thing, Cooking or cleaning, or both put together. As if cooking and cleaning and taking care of kids, isn’t a hard job to do. We as women aren’t just good for “only” that, we can do that and do many more things, all at once maybe. I’ve seen you mom, multitasking and just doing everything on time, making sure you have food cooked, and a clean home before you go into your seven hour night shift. Just because that’s what you do doesn’t mean my generation has to follow it, because we can all do bigger things, and become bigger people in this world.

Eavan Boland taught me that, her poem said enough, she stated the truth throughout her poem. She refers to a women as a “fire-eater”, someone who is looked at, and “a burning plume” someone who is mistaken to be something like a fire-eater but not being anything at all. In lines 1-4, “Our way of life has hardly changed since a wheel first whetted a knife.” Things haven’t changed mom, people still see women as they were seen before. Maybe not as bad as it was back in the day, I mean at least we can vote now, but the point is, women need to also step up to the plate and stop neglecting the fact that we can do it, that we can become CEO of a billion dollar company, we can own multiple businesses.

Well, mom, hopefully you get the chance to read this poem for yourself, and give me your opinion about it. I would love to discuss this with you.

With love,

Kathya Guevara