The speaker of Eavan Boland’s poem, “It’s a Woman’s World,” intends irony with the title of this poem: the world does not belong to a people who never change, who mark their lives by living outside of history, who calculate their failures as milestones, and who make excuses for remaining in this kind of stagnation. Yet the irony evaporates once we thoroughly analyze the speaker’s entire discourse: the speaker is indeed referring to a woman’s world, but that world is a fabled one that the speaker is concocting, certainly not one that has ever existed.
Eavan Boland is a noted poet, so perhaps the integrity of the poem may be found by considering it as hyperbole. But hyperbole or exaggeration is used for emphasis, which means that the claim has to be true at its base. For example, Thomas Wolfe’s “We stooped because the sky hung so low” or Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “My leg weighs three tons.” Both are easily recognized as exaggeration; we understand in the Wolfe sentence that the characters stooped and that Aldrich’s character’s leg had some weight.
When we try to interpret this poem in terms of hyperbole, we discover that it simply does not work. For example, the first claim that women’s lives have not changed since people first learned to sharpen knives with a grinding wheel. We have to wonder how that can be. Historically, we know all people’s lives have changed many times and dramatically since that time.
But even if we apply the hyperbole to that claim, we cannot sustain it, because the next claim is that other things have in fact changed, the use of fire and the further uses of the wheel, but not the lives of women. And the application of exaggeration disappears altogether by the time the speaker claims that women have made only low groans about certain oppressive situations.
The poem’s speaker loses credibility through misuse of attempted irony and exaggeration that seems to expand and contract like a rubber band. The following gives a stanza by stanza interpretation of the claims as this speaker narrates her disingenuous account of women’s supposed historical invisibility:
Our way of life
has hardly changed
since a wheel first
whetted a knife
The way women have conducted their lives has remained about the same for quite a long time; more specifically, since the invention of sharpening knives with a grinding wheel. When that was is difficult to determine. The wheel was invented approximately 5 centuries B.C. in Mesopotamia, India, and China. But exactly when a whet-stone was turned into a wheel is unclear. The point is, though, that for a very long time women have simply lived their lives the same way. Does that imply that men have changed their lives many times and many ways? And if so, which is better? To live the same way for centuries or change your ways of living often?
Maybe flame
burns more greedily
and wheels are steadier,
but we're the same:
The implications of the emphasis are: fire has become more voracious, no doubt, through the modern inventions such as stoves that help confine it so we can get more heat from less fuel, and wheels work better because we have improved their form and now we may even use them for travel; still women live the same way. Does that mean they refuse to take advantage of the new uses for fire, continuing to build their fires out of doors instead of making use of the new stoves? Does that mean that instead of using the new vehicles for travel, they still go on foot? Sounds silly, but the speaker claims that “we’re still the same.”
How have women remained the same?
we milestone
our lives
with oversights,
living by the lights
of the loaf left
by the cash register,
the washing powder
paid for and wrapped,
the wash left wet:
Women look at their lives and see only their faults and make those faults the highlights of their lives. Forgetting a loaf of bread at the store is a major accomplishment, or buying cleaning detergent, and then forgetting to dry the clothes. These are important landmarks for women.
like most historic peoples
we are defined
by what we forget
and what we never will be:
star-gazers,
fire-eaters.
It's our alibi
for all time:
Women also mark their “milestones” by fretting about things they will never do or never becoming the kinds of person they wish they could be. People in the past used to decide who they were by what they didn’t do or what they forgot, and that’s what women do. Who are those people? What people in history defined themselves by what they forgot? Is this a reworking of the old adage of history repeating itself, or if one does not learn by mistakes, one is destined to repeat the mistakes? But why is this situation confined to women? Of those “historic peoples,” were men included? But surely not, since the speaker is addressing only the lives of women.
Also women not only define themselves by what they forget, they define themselves by what they will never be. They will never have dreams or important goals worth striving for, as “star-gazers” do. They will never pursue difficult tasks and overcome them, as “fire-eaters do.” They will always find excuses for doing the same thing, century after century.
as far as history goes
we were never
on the scene of the crime.
When the king's head
gored its basket,
grim harvest,
we were gristing bread
or getting the recipe
for a good soup.
It's still the same:
Women have never been part of important events or “crimes” like beheading a king. Although beheading the king didn’t seem to be a crime at the time, it did seem to be the only way for his subjects to avoid death and assume freedom. But nevertheless, when such important events were taking place, women were making bread or swapping soup recipes. And “It's still the same.”
our windows
moth our children
to the flame
of hearth not history.
And still no page
scores the low music
of our outrage.
Not only do women fail to participate in historical events, they try to prevent their children from doing the same. They want their children to stay home and not go out and get involved in community, country, or world events.
But then after all this negativity and lack of participation, the speaker notes that no one has bothered to notice the indignation women have experienced because of these stagnated lives over the centuries. That must be because the “outrage” is likened to “low music,” and they have only cursed their lot under their breaths while continuing to live those invisible lives.
Appearances reassure:
that woman there,
craned to
the starry mystery,
is merely getting a breath
of evening air.
While this one here,
her mouth a burning plume -
she's no fire-eater,
just my frosty neighbour
coming home.
The speaker says that the way women continue to cope with their invisibility is by interpreting what they see in the way that fits their vision, the way that will still support the “alibi.” The women who are getting out and trying to participate in lives outside the home are merely out taking a walk to get a breath of fresh air, and the women who are speaking out and helping change certain antiquated laws are just stubborn, noisy women who will soon return to their homes and continue the sameness.
Without a clear use of poetic device such as irony or hyperbole or useful metaphor, this poem simply portrays a series of historical inaccuracies. No doubt there are individual women who have lived sheltered, stagnated lives similar to that world dramatized here, but for a poet to broadcast in verse this kind of situation as universal is irresponsible, because it demeans women’s lives.
How can we take this speaker seriously when we know that from the beginning of history woman have always done more than “milestone / [their] lives / with oversights”? Women have served in government, helped change antiquated laws that circumscribed the lives of both men and women, have influenced and participated in history in all the same ways that men have.
