The Young Housewife

In 1916, William Carlos Williams wrote against the backdrop of World War I. Significant battles occurred, such as the Gallipoli Campaign, in which the last of the British troops were evacuated from Gallipoli and the Ottoman Empire prevailed over a joint British-French operation to take Constantinople. In the Erzurum Offensive, Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire, but later at the Battle of Wadi, the Ottoman Empire would defeat British forces. However, during this time, Williams was working as a physician, practicing medicine by day and writing at night.

Williams held rich and varied views of women, and his poetry was often sexually charged. Women’s roles at this time were quite diverse, but none of them received much-deserved praise or significance from or in society. “The Young Housewife” is an observation of the male domination that founded domesticity during this period. Because “The Young Housewife” is a commentary on the sexism and oppression experienced by women during Williams’s time, the feminist movement in 1916 is significant to the poem. In February 1916, Emma Goldman, an anarchic political activist, was arrested in the United States after lecturing about birth control. In the same year, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, and Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, even though New York law at the time prohibited contraception.