An Analytical Essay on “The Plight of the High-Status Woman”

The article has demonstrated the emerging laments of educated young women of today.  It discusses the plight of modern women who were paying a high price for being educated and taking pride at their achievements and what they know they can achieve.  As a note of closing the traditional image of a woman being wooed or romanced, the article also fought at explaining the hazards of striving to attain or maintain a high-status career and its perk and jerks as well.

The article was very clear in expressing its arguments about the current plight of educated women.  I would say, though, that the examples could have been explained in a more detailed manner just so the fun in reading it could be improved.  It was, I should say, a fresh breath from the blatant representations of women’s values nowadays.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead had quite obviously worked on creating a parallel presentation between career and love life.  She had used different possible scenarios that a lot of women nowadays can truly relate to. What I have noticed though was that her presentation of the revenge format was a little exaggerated.  I can say that scenarios such as how some of her characters had taken revenge on their bosses are indeed possible, but should I say a little out of hand.  These kinds of things hardly happen in a corporate life.

Cheating it off when it comes to their careers, or meeting an abusive employer is, indeed possible.  However, to endure such maltreatment is a bit out of hand considering that we are talking about educated women.  It is a fact that we also have stringent laws when it comes to work relations and such oppression would be, I would say, a form of stupidity in women who are supposed to be depicted as ambitious and aspires to go up the corporate ladder.  Had their bosses been abusive, filing a complaint will not only rid them of their oppressor but possible give them a good chance of taking over.  However, otherwise was said to be the case in the article.

The women had seen the oppression as their means to go up and, eventually making their lives miserable, considering that their personal lives also are going haywire.  The author had obviously chosen to exaggerate the characters’ situations just so she can express justifiability in exacting revenge.

I would say that the format of how the entire article was also laid out was acceptable.  It was fashioned in such a way that the reader would be looking forward to the next character that the author would describe.  However, the words or the vocabulary that was used was still evident of its being academic in nature.  It would have been something that an “uneducated” person could relate to if the author had used word such as “small”, for example, instead of “miniscule”. Others would be jargon, like “temps” which turns out to mean temporary, or Girl Fridays, that not a regular person would immediately pick up as meaning to be an assistant cum date, as per how I understood at how the author used the term. Although we could understand that the author may have only been showing an educated presentation in relation to expressing the current situation of “high-status women”, I believe that it would still help if there was an attempt to reach out to the masses by utilizing a more simple vocabulary.

In connection with the formatting, the entire article was still an easy read.  Mainly I would say that it may be because of the short paragraphs that the author employed that made reading it fun.  It made me look forward to the next paragraph and wait and wonder what the situation is of Whitehead’s next character would be.  It did not bore me to death about reading a lengthy description of the characters’ oppression of their pathetic love lives or sexual detours but instead I was able to focus on the argument at hand.  And definitely, the author was never short in reiterating the point that she was driving at in each end of her characters’ presentation.

True to its title, “The Plight of the High-Status Woman”, the author had indeed used good representations of women who were expected to have had a career built up but are experiencing their own share of life’s dilemmas. It had offered a written description of the women’s situations that excellently befits the definition of the word “plight”, which is synonymous to the word “predicament”. And living up to the expectations of a “high-status woman” as used in the title, the author had indeed clearly defined why and how she had qualified a woman with a high education and that of a steep pride.  From this, I am confident that a lot of women would be able to relate to her characters and as I expect, a good volume of those would also start to learn to define just about what kind of a woman they are.

Similar to most people who I am confident would have read this article too, I can definitely conclude that this would be able to stir a particular sense of pride in every woman who finds herself having accomplished a lot in her life.  Moreover, this I find is an excellent arm to empower other women in learning to pick up the pieces of their shattered life and learn to face the realities of the modern generation: that slowly and surely a different set of categories are defining femininity.  This could and should never be limited to the thrills of being courted and wooed by a man but to the limitless achievements that she can choose to reach.  It makes women realize that what is happening to their personal life or love lives, to be more specific, is not an isolated case… that the same is possible also being undergone by another woman from the next block.  It makes the feminine gender think that the challenges of their lives, both personal and professional can not solely be blamed on the values that they have or how they were raised but also it makes them better understand that this is an emerging predicament with the constantly changing lifestyle that this generation now has.

Works Cited

Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “The Plight of the High-Status Woman”. The Atlantic Online. December 1999. Retrieved on September 15, 2008 from http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99dec/9912whitehead.htm

Bartleby.com. Retrieved on September 15, 2008 from http://www.bartleby.com/62/