Introduction: Poets often use voice to communicate the key message of the poem.

In both Eve to Her Daughters and Home of Mercy the feminine personas I refuse to be silenced, are showing that this person wants to change the traditional treatment on women where they are expected to be passive and are ignored by other people, to a better situation. Eve to Her Daughter and Home of Mercy are the poems with similar tone with this quote. It proves the key ideas that women always make mistakes, while the men are the innocent and women is passive in the society. Idea: women are the sinful side. #1: Eve to Her Daughter tells us that Eve accepted the life after her sinful act in Garden of Eden. She is not unhappy about her life after but the problem is that Adam changed to be more selfcentered, arrogant, and is full of hubris. He feels that he can create everything. From the poem states that he unravels everything mechanically as he is mechanical-minded and then he will know how the things work. From that point, he thinks that he creates everything and on the same level as God. Adam doesnt want to hear any advice from Eve, as she made his life terrible by encouraging him to also eat the fruit. Eve tells her daughters to be able to support themselves, not to be passive. The persona suggests that women are also capable and as valuable as the men. #2: Home of Mercy implies that the women are the ones to be blamed as Eve, the female, was the one who eat the forbidden fruit. Eve even encourage Adam, the male, to follow her step. This causes both of them to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden. By this story, the religions were led to believe that the women would lead the men astray and this is the reason why the women are less valuable than men. Home of Mercy shows how unfair these women were treated in the institution as if they are not worthy or even like human being. They were treated like machine, as if the institution thought that none of them deserved to be identified as an individual just because of their sin. Gwen Harwood attempts to tell the society how unfairly these women were treated. Idea: women are passive #3 Eve to Her Daughter implies that the men want to take over the world with their scientific rationalism. Men think that they know and create everything in the world. This fact made them arrogant and boastful. They forget that as human, they are imperfect. The women state that it is time to take over the mens role; to repair the natural destruction caused by the mens mechanical. The persona suggests that men cant work alone as they have their partners,

women, to put everything in balance again. 4# In Home of Mercy, the girls were sent by their families to the institution willingly or even by force. They were sent to the Magdalene Laundries after their innocence were taken by sexual assault or being as prostitutes in their early life. This shows the fact that these women were in the passive side of life were the girls who were sexually assaulted were directly taken to the institution without being given chance to make up for their sin. Instead, their families and the society assumed that these women were the one to blame, as it was the woman (Eve) who made the sin, not the men who dominate the society. Womens role was to follow the men. They didnt have power to voice their opinion in the society as the community saw that women had no power over the men. In this poem, Gwen Harwood uses a lot of binaries to emphasize the meaning of the poem. We can see the use of the binaries in strangled by the angel with their brutish figures. This dramatizes how the women were unfairly treated in the world of males. Conclusion As you can see, the quote of I refused to be silenced has the similar tone with poems Eve to Her Daughter and Home of Mercy where there is the unfairness of the treatment to the women in society. Both poems imply concern of the poets, Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood as the society view that women always commit sin, that women can do nothing. In fact, women are as capable as men; they deserved to be treated like an individual who can do something useful to the society. Women balanced the mens roles. For example, without each other, man and woman cant have a child. Women and men are supposed to cooperate with each other, see the opposite gender as an equal.