In the upper half were the tenderest emotions, the most exquisite ideals, the sweetest memories, all lovely sentiments as to “home” and “mother,” all delicate admiring adjectives, a sort of sanctuary, where a veiled statue, blindly adored, shared place with beloved yet commonplace experiences.

 

In the lower half--here that buried consciousness woke to keen distress--they kept quite another assortment of ideas. Here, even in this clean-minded husband of hers, was the memory of stories told at men’s dinners, of worse ones over-heard in street or car, of base traditions, coarse, epithets, gross experiences--known, though not shared.

 

And all these in the department “woman,” while in the rest of the mind--here was new knowledge indeed.

 

The world opened before her. Not the world she had been reared in--where Home had covered all the map, almost, and the rest had been “foreign,” or “unexplored country,” but the world as it was--man’s world, as made, lived in, and seen, by men.

 

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman