Research Paper on:
Women’s Power and Equality in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
stories from his compilation entitled The Canterbury Tales, "The Wife of Baths Prologue and Tale," Chaucer considered the plight of medieval women and the social inequities they consistently faced on  the basis of their gender. Traditionally, the patriarchy celebrated the feminine ideal of womanhood, an attractive, docile creature and not particularly intelligent creature who wanted only to marry, have  children, and please her husband. Furthermore, "The ideal woman is a quiet woman," who speaks only when spoken to, and whatever marital unhappiness she may be experiencing are suffered  in silence (Hallissy 106). But the Wife of Bath is anything but quiet. She boldly declares that real women bear little or no resemblance to the stereotypes reinforced  by the patriarchy. They did not simply exist to serve as mens sex objects; as these works illustrate, sexuality is not the exclusive property of men. Women do  not wish to be submissive or seek only to give pleasure. Instead, they want to be active sexual partners who expect a sexual relationship to be 50/50, with each  willing to give and receive gratification. These stories are timeless expressions of womens desire for power and equality that has remained constant throughout history. The Prologue features the  much-married Dame Alice, who is a shrewd manipulator of men who unabashedly uses them to further her own status and financial means. She makes no secret of the fact  that she loves sex and the tale, interestingly, "is more concerned with the husbands obligation than with the wifes obligation to satisfy the sexual needs of her partner" (Nelson 167).  Dame Alice laments the double standard that society elects to ignore as it is "deeply rooted in culture" (Blake). Why is it that men like Abraham and Jacob