What is the emotional feminine experience in Oates' "Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money"?

Joyce Carol Oates' 1978 poem Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money addresses both the feminine and masculine experiences in her portrayal of modern, conventional American life. That said, her primary focus is the female experience, as this is where she starts and ends her poem. She begins with "she is staring/peaceful as the rain" in the poem's opening lines and closes with "mothers stoop/the oven doors settle with a thump . . . the relief of emptiness rains/simple, terrible, routine/at peace" in the closing stanza.

The association of the feminine element with rain is hard to ignore, and though rain is generally connected to melancholia or sadness, Oates acknowledges that rain can be "peaceful." Indeed, there is some comfort in routine. By extension, female lives can be conceived of as similarly routine and similarly peaceful, though not without the "terrible" simplicity.

The poem's title adduces a contrast between the male and female experiences. The male experience is also portrayed realistically and unromantically ("Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front/tough plastic with detachable lids"). While Oates privileges the representation of women's experiences by means of the poem's structure, she presents men with an everyday heroism as they work typical 9–5 jobs ("the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home/unfolded Monday morning").

We get a bit more insight into women's domestic experience in the larger part of the poem. Women's lives are food, according to Oates, because they are relegated to the domestic sphere. They "break eggs with care," "scrap[e] garbage from the plates," "unpack groceries," and "rinse" and "stack" dishes. Women's engagement with society (outside the home) is presented as comprising "panel discussions on abortions, fashions, [and] meaningful work" (and here the word "meaningful" is fraught—the reader pauses to question what constitutes meaningful work). This rather sarcastic collection of events suggests that even the social sphere for women is less than fulfilling. By contrast, the "routine" and "simple" environment of the home is where women experience the world.

While there is a suggestion that women's domestic work is meaningful (as caregivers to the sparsely described "long-limbed children"), Oates is decidedly less optimistic concerning women's emotional experience, as the opening stanza describes a woman's house as having "floorboards [which] assert themselves" (unlike, we are meant to assume, women themselves). The final stanza finds a collective, generic group of women among stacked dishes. The reader is left to understand the female emotional experience as both "peaceful" and "simple," but nonetheless "terrible" for these familiar and restricted lifestyle qualities.

What are the feminine themes in "Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money"?

Joyce Carol Oates's poem begins by alternating the lives of the women and the men. As the title suggests, the first theme is the importance of food in the life of the women:

breaking eggs with care

scraping garbage from the plates

unpacking groceries hand over hand.