Chapter Two Analysis

On a quest for answers, the narrator takes a trip to the British Museum in London. After randomly selecting a dozen or so books in hopes to discover the mysteries of men, wealth, creativity, and women, she soon apprehends that there are an abundance of books written about women by men, but hardly about men by women. Frustrated by this paradox and the fact that there was nothing about what she wondered in the book’s content, she draws a picture depicting an angry male writing about the inferiority of women. After returning the useless books, she goes to lunch.

We realize after reading about her experience with the books, that she is dealing with institutionalized sexism. But, why would anybody be angry if they have so much importance, power, and money in this patriarchal society? After pondering this question while reading a newspaper at lunch, she uses the “looking glass” metaphor to illustrate how it makes men seem twofold their natural size, indicating that their self-confidence is attained by making women inferior to them, which explains why they feel angry and defensive if criticized by a woman: this makes them lose their higher status in the model where women act as pawns to enlarge the “kingliness” [yes, i just made that word up] of men, on which they depend.


In a passage about the inheritance from her aunt and the effects it has on her life, and how money equals freedom, and is more important even than the right to vote… money makes women independent of men, whereas women’s suffrage merely gives her a chance to pick which man from the ballot will rule over her.