Dec 11, 2009

It’s a Woman’s World | Introduction

Eavan Boland’s “It’s a Woman’s World” was first published in her poetry collection Night Feed (1982). The poem can also be found in An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (1996).

Like many poems in Night Feed, “It’s a Woman’s World” focuses on issues of female identity and how the contributions of women have been overlooked in Irish art, myth, and history. Boland also highlights the domestic work and lives of Irish women in the poem, which is another popular theme throughout the collection. In creating the poems in Night Feed, Boland drew inspiration from the paintings of Jan Van Eyck and Jean-Baptiste Chardin, which mostly depict still-life and domestic scenes. By focusing attention on the domestic aspect of life, Boland gives the domestic sphere a place of importance in history. By expressing that women have contributed to the wider culture through their domestic work, she also emphasizes the inaccuracy of leaving women off the historical record.

Boland employs rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to enhance the impact of her themes in “It’s a Woman’s World.” She also uses short lines and varying stanza lengths, which break from tradition, reinforcing her theme of reworking old modes of expression to include contributions of women to Irish history and culture.

It’s a Woman’s World Summary

Lines 1–4

In the first stanza of “It’s a Woman’s World,” Boland introduces the idea that women’s lives have remained largely unchanged throughout history. Boland’s use of a clichéd phrase as the title sets the poem’s somewhat bitterly ironic tone. The first word of the poem, “Our,” refers to women, as the poem’s title indicates that the poem’s subject is the female sphere. Her reference to “a wheel” alludes to another clichéd phrase, “since the invention of the wheel,” which generally means “since humans started using tools,” or “since ages and ages ago.” The use of “knife” as the last word also creates a sense of drama and hints at danger or violence to come.

Lines 5–8

In the second stanza, Boland elaborates on the theme she established in the first stanza. She stresses that women’s lives have remained unchanged, although technological advances such as more powerful combustion and improved wheels have occurred. In so doing, Boland invokes two of the most significant discoveries in the development of civilization, as both fire and the wheel have been crucial to human progress and industry. “Flame” introduces the symbol of fire, which Boland invokes several times in the poem. Her second use of “wheel” (which appeared in the first stanza) subtly reinforces the sense of the passage of time, as suggested by yet another common phrase, “the wheels of time turning.”

Lines 9–17

Boland extends the long sentence begun in the second stanza through the third and fourth stanzas. By providing details from the traditionally female world of domestic labor, she continues to elaborate on the theme of how women’s lives have hardly changed. The “loaf” alludes to the daily chore of buying groceries for a family, while the “washing powder” and “wash” refer to the domestic chore of doing laundry.

Using the metaphor of “milestone,” which is a marker on a road, Boland expresses that the speaker and other women measure their lives by the “oversights,” or tasks they have forgotten to do. Boland suggests that, throughout history, women’s work has consisted of a series of preoccupying but unmemorable daily responsibilities centered on food and cleaning. By twice using the word “left” in these stanzas, she emphasizes how forgettable these tasks are. Boland also highlights the economic aspect of the work by mentioning the cash register and the paid-for powder. By including these details, she suggests women have not been paid for their domestic work.

These two stanzas depart from the form established in the first two stanzas. Stanza 3 contains five, not four lines. Instead of end rhyming the first and last lines of each stanza as she did in stanzas 1 and 2, Boland... » Complete It’s a Woman’s World Summary