What Do You Know About Friends? - Feminist

      Men don’t really make an appearance within the story. Aside from the references to the Nazi’s, men are not represented as naturally dominant and active. Josl, the father, ‘chauffeured his two daughters around every Saturday morning’, and Renia, one of the main female characters, was more dominant in the way she referred to everyone as ‘pigs’. Josl doesn’t appear more dominant than his daughter.

     Within the piece, written in the 1990’s, a character called Mrs Bensky, goes to university. This doesn’t question traditional gender roles or social structures, as it was quite normal by this point for women to go to university. There are no other clear aspects of the piece that questions social structures or gender roles.

     Women are portrayed as independent and in control within the piece. Renia is very powerful in the way she refers to those beneath her as ‘pigs’. Mrs Bensky is a independent and dominant in the way she verbally places herself above other, ‘Such and idiot is that Mrs Berman.’ … ‘She is not so intelligent’. Mrs Bensky also shows her dominance when she calls her tutor to discuss her physics grade, asking him why she had gotten a worse mark than ‘John Matheson … he told me himself that [Mrs Bensky] did understand the molecules much better than him’.

     The female characters still accept their roles within the family and society. Mrs Bensky ‘had to wash six sheets, four pillow cases, three eiderdown covers and seven towels’, she had to ‘scrub and polish the floor, and vacuum the carpets’, and she also had to ‘cook and wash up’. Mrs Bensky seems to take pride in this role of housewife.