Examining the concept of gender equality in Anne Finch’s ‘The Unequal Fetters’.
This paper shows how Anne Finch in the poem ‘The Unequal Fetters’ refuses to be bound by the chains that perceptions of gender enforce on women and speaks out against the inequality that rules society -through the beliefs of men and women alike.
Anne Finch was an acclaimed writer in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century when women were marginalized in society. She threw away the barriers that gender imposed on her and refused to bow to the conventions of society. Had she been alive today she would have been declared a feminist and enjoyed a freedom that she could not, even with her foresight, have imagined.