The Women Who Did It All

Blog Option #4

In the story “Death in the Woods,” by Sherwood Anderson, we learn about a woman who is left to take care of an entire farm on her own, while being treated like dirt by everyone around her. The reader is never even given the woman’s name, which further emphasizes her lack of importance to the characters around her. Her one task in life is to serve others, including all of her farm animals. She must maintain a farm, with very little money, while her husband and son are away for long periods of time. This woman’s struggle personally reminds me of someone close to me.

 

Growing up in a military family, with a father who was in the Navy and gone on long deployments, I can relate to this story. I see a lot of similarities between my mother and the woman. Anderson writes, “Sometimes he [her husband] was gone for weeks…They [her husband and son] left everything at home for her to manage and she had no money. She knew no one” (Anderson 167). Like the woman in the story, my mother was constantly left to manage us children. She had three of us, and she did it with very little money. We lived off of a single military income, which is very minimal to take care of a family of five. Just like the woman, my mother struggled to provide, but would never allow us go without, no matter what. She would always find a way.  Not only was she doing this without my father around, but she also was forced to move away from family and friends when we had to relocate, leaving her without outside support. The stress of making sure the children did not go to bed hungry was a fear shared between my mother and the woman in the story. The woman in the story ultimately continued to put others, including the animals, first before her own needs up until her death. I could imagine my own mother doing the same for her kids.