Sister Kate

3 Pages 817 Words

Jean Bedford portrays the women as victims in ‘Sister Kate’. Do you agree? Discuss with detailed reference to the text.

The women are portrayed in the novel ‘Sister Kate’ as victims of society and especially men. The author of the novel, Jean Bedford, is an active feminist and uses the characters in the novel to express her views on 19th Century working-class women. The text suggests that men are continuously degrading the females in the workplace and in their own homes. Police officers were constantly harassing the Kelly women when the men were gone. The women were expected to stay home and look after the house and the large numbers of children while the men were out working, stealing or just having fun. The majority of the women had dull lives due to family commitments (which the men were exempt from) and limited employment opportunities.

All of the lower class women in the novel tend to be housewives, barmaids or prostitutes. Jean Bedford really stresses the point that women had no rights as employees, if they somehow managed to get a job. When Kate Kelly obtained a job at the Hotel she was told she was on ‘half wages, while you’re learning’. When she asked Ivy, a fellow barmaid, how long it would take before she was paid full wages, ‘Ivy looked around shiftily. She was not paid the full rate herself.’ Even though they despised it, most of the women in the bar had to sell their bodies after work to make enough money to live on. Prostitution became almost a routine for some of the girls in the bar. In fact Ivy kept whoring herself until she was nearly dead. Kate would often find Ivy intoxicated and ‘crumpled against a wall between the hotel and their rooms, her skirt still hitched around her waist and her hands closed tightly around the coins left by her hasty customer’. When Kate attended to the half-conscious and drunk woman, Ivy made ‘feeble movements towards her clothing’ and obviously thought it wa...