Anne Brandstreet and Female Identity Essay -- Anne Brandstreet Poems P

There be not many major womanly writers in American Literature, and writing, traditionally, has always been viewed as a masculine activity. It is then very interesting, and even ironic, that the first author published in the freshly established puritan society on the American soil, Anne Bradstreet, was a female. Indeed, Bradstreets poems argon filled with female presence. However, I also sense that Bradstreets womens lib is held in check by her Puritan values, and there is a combat created throughout her writing between this society of Puritan patriarchy that she lived in and her identity as a female.Bradstreets poems are focused on the simple pleasures found in the realities of the present. She rejoices in the presence of nature that she sees skirt her in Contemplations, rather than that in the pleasure of Jesus and her Puritan trust (like Phyllis Wheatley does). Part of the reality for Bradstreet is living as a female in a male-dominated society. Bradstreet embraces this, but at the same time questions the views towards females. Women in Puritan society played a subordinate role in a traditional patriarchal family structure, and were relatively restricted in their opportunities. They were not for the most part viewed as equals to men, and in The Prologue, Bradstreet questions her role, and thus a womans role, in writing poetry. At the end of the prologue Bradstreet writes, Let Greeks be Greeks, and woman what they are Men have precedency and ...