Williams

Williams’s “The Young Housewife” seems to paint an image of how dismal the life of a housewife can be. It goes along with how many modern day working women would view a housewife, making her out to be shy and working for a man.
First, the poem tells the reader that it is 10 A.M. in the morning, a time when a working woman would be at work, and the housewife is “behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house” (lines 2-3). Behind wooden walls makes her sound trapped and enclosed. And the fact that Williams calls it her husband house shows that she is living via her husband. This type of relationship does not imply equality but more that the husband owns the house, and she is confined in it, working for him.
The next stanza talks about her going to meet with various public service men and she is “shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair” (lines 7-8). She is not confident in her own skin as she seems shy and timid around these men. Women wear corsets to shape their bodies into an ideal figure. The fact that she is shy and timid in relation to not having her body shaped right shows a lack of personality strength and makes it seems as though she is living to meet some man’s ideal, and is uncomfortable when she does not.
Williams likens her to a “fallen leaf” (line 9) and at the end of the poem speaks of his “rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves” (lines 10-11). Peter Baker of the Modern American Poetry asks “is the woman something crushed or discarded?” This is what the poem seems to be saying to me to. Today, with so many opportunities for women, a housewife does not look so glamorous, and Williams portrays her as a weak character, shy and timid, working for his husband in his house. At the end she is nothing but a fallen leaf that is crunched and discarded by the wheels of a car.