Gender double standards, part of the effects of gender stereotypes, are reflected in Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963. This work tells the story of a young woman named Esther Greenwood, who is extremely intelligent but begins to contemplate suicide in New York during her internship at a magazine house. One of the main reasons for her suicide attempt is that she cannot bear the burden of gender double standards imposed by society. Society and the people around her expect her to play a traditional female role, but she cannot adapt to such a restrictive image. This limited gender role is supported by social activities such as education, marriage, prescriptions for sexual freedom, and career choices in the novel. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay First, gender double standards exist in education and career in The Bell Jar. The society Plath describes provides education for women, but Esther clearly describes the education of the young women staying at the Amazon Hotel: "They were all going to fancy secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves in class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were executive secretaries and just hanging out in New York waiting to marry some career man or something” (56 ). Esther's descriptions imply that women's education is useless because educated women and uneducated women both waited to marry instead of working. In the novel, some women are forced to work alone because the men on whom they depend become disabled or die. Esther's mother can be cited as an example: "My mother taught shorthand and typing to many of the city's students and didn't come home until mid-afternoon" (115). Society's double standards produce these limitations in women's careers. Although Esther won a college scholarship to major in English (a seemingly masculine pursuit), her mother kept asking her to study shorthand, because shorthand was a stable and secure job. Such work was prescribed for women and accepted by society at that time. Plath describes Esther's mother's attitude toward Esther's more cerebral specialty: “I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't find a good job after college. My mother kept telling me that no one wanted to major in plain English” (76). This is not just Esther's mother's perspective, but also Esther's world as a whole. Plath uses specific and well-crafted vocabulary to show how Esther faces such uncertainty about her career: "The only thing was that when I tried to imagine myself in a job, quickly jotting down line after line a shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn’t a single job I wanted to do where shorthand was used” (122). Worse still, women were forced to abandon their careers due to pressures from the society around them. Dodo is one of the examples in the novel, a woman who abandons her career or perhaps never had a career. After all, “Dodo raised her six children – and would undoubtedly raise her seventh – on Rice Krispies, peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, vanilla ice cream and gallons and gallons of..