Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore

HUMANITIES SS-101

The article “How the Superwoman Myth Puts Women Down” is written by Sylvia Rabiner, an American
woman who got her education from Hunter College and the New York University. She is an active
freelance writer, a high school teaching consultant and a mother of two. Her life is a combination of
struggle and constant hard work.She is a lady from a mediocre background and also a single mother
and have faced the difculties and hardships that an average woman of a modern day society goes
through. The article is a sort of persuasive text with a comparison between author’s life and that of
ideal women of the current society on real grounds. It describes how those poster ladies who achieved
big and are so called superwomen of the society are causing a sense of inferiority and lack of
confdence in the average women of society. Also, it revolves around the comparison between author’s
circumstances and that of idea’s to portray the concept of Superwoman, in an average case, as a myth
or a false ideology. The author describes the struggle a woman has to go through to keep her lifecycle
run smoothly when she has to start from the zero point. The article also put some light on
the psychology of a woman as well to support the idea and emotional factor is also involved.
The article is written in a very informal style. Sentence structure is simple and the text is easy to
apprehend. As the author is currently alive and the article was written in post-post-modern time, the
text is written in an unconventional manner and grabs the attention of the contemporary audience and
is easy to apprehend. Also, she mentions some superwomen of her time and without bothering about
their history, she bought them in her discussion by quoting only their achievements because
achievements were the main thing bothering her mind at that time and neglected their effort as a
whole. She lies stress on her effort persuasively but gave zero importance to the hardships and efforts
of all those successful women. She propagates the ideas in a very systematic manner but her article
lacks the research element in it. She made a comparison on the basis of her own life experience but in
the real world, experiences are so diversifed that one cannot negate anything on the basis of a single
subject. She makes a generalization of the average women on the basis of her own hardships and life
experiences. Her article is making a comparison but in a very biased and emotional manner which
makes her idea somewhat weak and hollow because it lacks logical and neutral grounds