This week’s reading is giving me a clearer sense of the America Whitman is envisioning through his poetry. “Song of the Broad-Axe” shows a nation that has been built by the working man, and is still being built by the working man. Whitman describes it as a place “where the citizen is always the head and the ideal” and “where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as men, where they enter the public assembly and take the places the same as the men” (p.335-336). This is where Whitman’s I begin to become suspicious of this so-called “ideal.”
Obviously Whitman is a supporter of women’s rights, I don’t doubt that. He is clear when addressing the reader that he means “man or woman,” “he or she,” etc. Something that bothers me though is the lack of women taking part in Whitman’s America. He writers that “a great city is that which has the greatest men and women” (p.335). There is no mention though of women ever helping to create that city. Whitman writes of “the six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam” but where are the women helping to lay the foundation? There is no reference to men and women building the nation together. Furthermore, as far as I have read, Whitman never takes women out of their traditionally assigned gender roles of being mothers, housewives and shop girls. While you could argue Whitman was portraying life as he saw it, I believe there’s more to it than that. I think that Whitman does believe women are equal to men, and that their voices should be heard and listened to in earnest, but he doesn’t suggest that women should work alongside men. He keeps them in the home, or working at sewing machines. Even when he tells the reader in “Song of Occupations” that “the wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband…the mother, and she is every bit as much as the father” (p. 356). There is no mention of simply the woman being equal to the man. He writes of men building up the nation, and then they will eventually raise women and slaves to be their equals. Where is the woman fighting for her right to vote? Where is the woman fighting for equal pay or job opportunities? Why are these not images he included in his sweeping and romantic descriptions of America? Even when referring to slaves, he portrays them as downtrodden people who he must nurture and care for, who could do nothing, achieve nothing without his help.
In my opinion, Whitman likes the idea of women and slaves having equal rights, but he writes about it more as a passing interest than something he is deeply convicted of. I hate to end another blog in suspicion, but Whitman leaves me no choice.
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