【正文】 ould reach their aims and provides them convenience. Austen describes Charlotte’s marriage as a symbol, through which Austen shows the readers what low status women hold. In the novel, marriage is an everlasting and hot topic for all the people, especially for women and their families. Although marriage is an odd phenomenon in the end 18th and early 19th century middle class’s country life in Britain, it is very mon. Women never considered the marriage itself, but to what extent that they would be benefited from a marriage. Mrs. Ben, for example never concerns about the moral and teaches her daughters the view of moral. “The business of her life was to get her daughters married” and she thinks that could fetch her daughters wealthy and high status husbands。s federations and other women39。 Secondly, women enjoy equal rights with men with respect to culture and education. These cover school admittance, advancement to higher levels of schooling, job assignment after graduation, conferment of academic degrees and being dispatched for study abroad, plus women39。 women are still treated unfairly, and they have to fight against traditional prejudice and selfcultivation to their status’s enhancement. Key Words Women’s status。 publicity and implementation of the Marriage Law, reforms on women’s political and working life, and so on. Women’s status was enhanced, to a large extent. By means of these largescale mass movements, New China took only a few years to clean up the filth and mire left over from a feudal society that had lasted for thousands of years. It effected fundamental emancipation for women in all aspects of political, economic, cultural, social and family life. This represented a significant transformation in the history of contemporary social development that China can be proud of. It was also an important contribution made by the Chinese revolution to the worldwide movement for women39。 after marriage, their husbands。 they can earn their status through hard work and their advantages. However, women in the end 18th and early 19th century English society had no these free choices. Their formal education and job were limited, and the society could not wele of a woman entering a profession, and their knowledge seemed no use to the society. If a woman was unmarried, no matter she was mature or not, she was not allowed to live alone and must live with her family, at least live with a suitable chaperone until her marriage or her spinsterhood to death. In Austen’s age, women’s actions were strictly limited and they could not enjoy their personal freedom Ⅱ Reasons for the Women’s Low Status at That Time A. Traditional Feudal Notions Observing the novel Pride and Prejudice from another aspect, we know that the theme of the novel does not only deal with love and marriage, but also includes the relationship of women, society, and women’s status. Jane Austen has shown the social fabric of society during her time and makes a ment on the status of women during that time. In Austen’s time, society treated women unfairly and women really enjoyed low status To know clearly what Jane Austen writes Pride and Prejudice for, we should firstly have a clear mind of the social background and know, under the traditional feudal notion how the society treated the women in the 18th and 19th century country society in Britain In the novel, Austen presents the gender injustices in the 19th century English society, and how the important role that money played in determining a woman’s daily life, marriage and destiny. Economically dependent, women were robbed of property and inheritance rights and possessed no independent source of ine. The entailment of the Longbourn estate is an extreme hardship on the Ben family, and is quite obviously unjust. No right to entail their father’s estate leaves the Ben daughters in a poor financial situation which both requires them to be married and makes it more difficult to marry well. Having no social status, and in order to improve their social status, women have to give up their personal dignity and ego at the expense of their love and marriage, and they are willing to get married just for financial security and enhancement of social status. Under these values of money and social status, women they can’t enjoy a happy marriage and their freedom. And they are deprived of the right to receive education and take part in 英語(yǔ) 畢業(yè)論文 ivsocial activities. Because there are no needs for higher education for them, and even if there is necessity to receive a higher education, it is just for selfenhancement or for pleasing their husbands. At that time, society offered few opportunities to women to choose for their lives and to decide the destiny. Just as the opening sentence of the novel says “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” which tells the reader that men were always in the dominant status in a marriage and the heritance of property. Thus men enjoy the right to choose their wives according to their will. Through Pride and Prejudice, Austen portrays the monly held views on the characters’ marriage. Society, at that time, put a significant value on property and social status, and women in such a society, with their privileges tightly limited, had no chance to develop their personalities and their characters were fettered by the society. There were no centrally anized systems of state—supported schools, and some local grammar schools did exist but did not admit girls. So women’s education became impossible, and they didn’t have careers, but society required little for their use of knowledge and gave little chance for them to use knowledge. They were denied the possibility of improving their status or gaining their fi