What Women Want: Then and Now :: The Wife of Bath’s Tale Essays

What Women Want: Then and Now 1. According to â€Å"The Wife of Bath’s Tale† and the story of Dame Ragnell, what is it that women most desire? Do you agree or disagree? Explain. According to these two tales, women desire sovereignty over their husbands, to be treated as masters over their love. Women wish to be given the ultimate say over whichever decisions might be brought into their household. They wish for their men to behave without arrogance and supremacy, to step to their every move in unison. We women simply ask that a man might think with his head and not with his ego, he should think about the impact his behavior has on us. I would agree to with this statement. However I think that is the nature of HUMAN desire to try to control everything surrounding us, to be able to think and decide on our own how something may affect us, and to decide whether or not our decisions will make our lives better or worse. Humans also like to have control over another and to be able to be so important to someone that no decision is ever made without your consultation. More often than not, even in contemporary culture, men dictate to the household what will be done because they make the money. Then, again as times have changed, this fact becomes fallacy and women have begun to step up to the plate, claiming this right for themselves. Women in the fourteenth century had almost no legal rights and were claimed as their husband’s property for dowry. Presently and thankfully, such tremendous circumstance is uncommon. What men do not understand is that women already have control over everything. They just hide it in subliminal messages so that the man will think any idea his own and find himself brilliant in his pronouncement of resolution. All the while the woman has been furtively planting the idea in his head. It is a matter of arrogance, if you ask me. Men need to feel as though they are the foundation of a family; they are the means by which it might survive. Women are sensible enough to understand this arrogance as a fact, and use it to work in their favor. Women know that so long as they propose the idea as their husband’s, the men will think it great. For example, pretend you need a girl’s night out.