To this present day, women throughout America would be drastically different and would withhold fewer rights if it were not for women in the nineteenth and twentieth century like the characters Madame Ratignolle, Edna Pontellier, and Mademoiselle Reisz in the novel The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. They shaped America into a place where freedom and equality for women is possible. Although the three women were different, they all contributed to different aspects of the feminist movement. Each character represents a distinct type of woman that strongly relates to the progressive stages of the great feminist movement in America.

The female character, Madame Ratignolle, simply represents a "true woman," who is everything that the society in the novel expects her to be and blindly follows the social duties of women. She is the perfect housewife and the perfect mother, who does everything that her husband expects her to do...