<p>I would like to share my DBQ essay to see what others think of it and how I can improve on the next one I write. I used the DBQ prompt and documents provided in the Princeton Review 2010 study guide practice test 1From</p>
<p>The prompt is…</p>
<p>“Using the following documents, discuss the barriers women have worked for more equal treatment in society. Consider the goals and methods of such campaigns. What additional kinds of documents would be useful in attempting to answer these questions?”</p>
<p>My essay is as follows…</p>
<pre><code> From the documents provided, it is clear that barriers prohibited women from receiving equal treatment in society. Women were undeniably denied the same rights given to men that prevented equal treatment, as shown by documents 1, 2, 3, and 5. Customs, whether traditional or religious, gave women specific roles that often denied them equal treatment in society (doc. 4, 6, 7). To better understand whether women had a skewed view in regards to what they considered a barrier to equal treatment, a document written from a male perspective would be useful to provide alternative views on the treatment of women.
Throughout history, most cultures have made women subservient to men. In the times of the Oppian Law in ancient Rome, only men were allowed to enjoy the benefits of private wealth while women could not even purchase luxurious goods (doc. 3). Of course, the women of this time period were eventually able to get the law repealed by protesting the tribunes’ vetoes. Women in the late nineteenth century were denied the right to vote that men had, even though they worked just as hard as their male counterparts did (doc. 1). In South Africa, during the mid-twentieth century, women also strived for voting rights in addition to the employment opportunities, property rights, etc., that men had (doc. 2). As the aforementioned document was written in a formal, non-opinionated tone by a group of women, is it difficult to determine whether there was a dominant bias in the writing of this document. In the early times of the Industrial Revolution, women faced arguably unfair working conditions, having an average of 20-hour work days with detrimental consequences to their health (doc. 5). As this particular document was written in the voice of one of said working women, there may be a particular bias as to how unfair the document makes the working condition of the women of the era out to be, although the writer does say that men did not go through such working conditions themselves. From these documents, it is evident that women had to live under vastly different working conditions than their male counterparts and that they had to ask for various reforms to receive equal treatment in society. Even so, it may help to have a document outlining the lives of women in a more egalitarian society (such as China under Zedong) to serve as a reference point to the unequal lives of women presented in the given documents.
Another factor that served as a barrier to equal living conditions for women was customs that gave women specific roles in their lives. In the early 100’s C.E., women living in China were instructed to never question their parents’ wishes, despite “how wrong they might be” (doc. 4). As this document was written by Ban Zhao, a Confucian, there is an obvious bias as to how she believed women should have acted in the time period, primarily because Confucianism, the dominant philosophy of the region during the given time period, stressed following and accepting your role in life. In the early 1800’s in an unspecified region, widows were burned alive because they were thought to have little to no purpose in life because they couldn’t remarry and had limited rights (doc. 7). However, because this document was written only in the point of view of an advocate, it is difficult to tell whether women of the culture truly felt that dying was preferable to living with limited rights; ergo, they had very little say in the matter, in retrospect to this document. Aung San Suu Kyi acknowledges that women had been restricted to the home and family for most of history but goes on to state that the changing customs will continue to enhance the equal treatment of women (doc. 6).
Women have had to real with rights granted to men but not to them and established customs in order to get fair and equal treatment. Among some of the methods they used to strive for equality were protests, holding conferences, and asking for reform.
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<p>Here are some of the problems I had when writing this essay:</p>
<ul>
<li>I took WAYYYYYYY to long to write it (about 1 hour - 90 minutes), but I am now familiar with the areas I am struggling and taking the most time on, so I will work on that.</li>
<li>I also had a bit of trouble interpreting the prompt at the beginning, but I think I got it down for the most part.</li>
</ul>
<p>Anyways, thanks in advance for any critique.</p>
That being said, I didn’t really plan that essay, so I didn’t get all my thoughts down well enough.</p>