SOURCE: “When Women Choose: All's Well That Ends Well,” in Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays, Associated University Presses, 1997, pp. 35-63.

In the following essay, Dash discusses the subject of women's sexual options within the patriarchal society of All's Well That Ends Well.

How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking? 

I.i.150-51

Although the phrase “catch 22” had not yet entered the language, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1898 described the concept with precision—as it applies to women's lives. She noted that even though the young girl “is carefully educated and trained to realize in all ways her sex-limitations and her sex-advantages” with the ultimate aim of marriage,

she must not even look as if she wanted it. … What one would logically expect is a society full of desperate and eager husband-hunters, regarded with popular approval. Not at all! (emphasis added, 581-82)

And the irony...