Kate Chopin woke people up to the feelings and minds of women writers in the nineteenth century by crossing forbidden borders of the Victorian Era. Author and feminist Kate Chopin was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri. The American writer wrote the short story "The Story of an Hour" in 1894 (Toth 5). Chopin lived during the Victorian Era and was a first hand witness to the suppression women faced in the late nineteenth century. Unlike most women at that time, Chopin was far from a conformist (Petry 8). She showed increasing concern for women and she responded with scandalous writings dealing explicitly with love, sex, and marriage (Thomas 19). "The Story of an Hour" revolves around what goes through a person's head when informed that a close family member has died, in this case the husband. Upon hearing of her husband's death, Mrs. Mallard was faced with conflicting emotions that she does not quite understand. In this famous short story, Kate's refusal to be silenced is all too evident. Her well- thought out stories reflect her own life as well as her interest in female independence, male dominance, and issues of selfhood, during a time period in which it was unexpected and not always embraced with open arms.
             Chopin's fathers death prompted her to live her childhood years without a father, being raised in a matriarchal environment would shape the rest of Chopin's life as well as her style of writing (Petry 35) After the death of her father she was then left living with her mother and her great grandmother (Toth 12). Being raised by two females resulted in Chopin's great independence and interest in female self -assertion. Her great grandmother set an example for Chopin at a very young age and she came to understand "that women could be as tough minded and self reliant as men, that gender roles had more to do with economic power than with biology and th...