The Rules of Conduct: Being Proper or Having Success

Paula Smith

English 101

Frankenfield

May 14, 2013

The Rules of Conduct

Being Proper or Having Success

Let me throw this question out there to some of you. I would like to know how we as women are supposed to succeed in this world while remaining proper. Even though the act of being proper was significant back in the day, is it still as important today? There is also a fine line between acting proper and having the strength to succeed and overcoming obstacles in our lives. We all know there is a time and place to “be a lady” and a time and place to fight with full force for ourselves. It is when these two things overlap that it becomes difficult to decide which road to take.

We all have heard the phrases, rules of conduct and code of conduct. These are the rules of how to act in a business place or setting, but this also applies to our personal lives. It is what our mothers teach us from a young age, how to act and present ourselves like a lady. Today most of us do not have a problem with knowing the difference between how to act at work in a professional environment and how to act at home. The current women of today have been doing it for years, we know the difference between home and work but if you go back to the early 1900’s, this was not the case. Many women did not work at this time and the only rules they needed to know were those of domestic life. There is one other problem that we women struggle with and this is when acting like a lady and fighting for our souls, our jobs or our opinions coincides. We start thinking to ourselves, what side wins? Other questions we start to ask ourselves are if I choose one identity, do I have to sacrifice or compromise the other? Can I balance the two and combine them into a “hybrid species,” or do I risk ending up as nothing as a result-someone entirely lacking a place in the world and an identity to guide myself? These were some of the questions that Virginia Woolf faced during her lifetime and...