In the 19th century, both men and women were subjects of patriarchal societies and, as such, fit into the particular roles associated with gender. Men were seen as being in charge and were often professionals. Women, on the other hand, were expected to be pious and domestic—the “hostages of the home” (Welter 43). Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" and Barbara Welter's "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860" both reflect the repressed lives that American women were forced to live. Gilman's narrator suffers from the patriarchal construction of her society but ultimately shows that the cult of true femininity can be broken. While the narrator's intense imagination would have allowed her to excel in writing, being subjected to the cult of true femininity overpowered her potential, pushing her to revolt against society. Gilman illustrates the oppression of women in society through the characters of the narrator, her husband John, John's sister Jennie, the nanny Mary, and, of course, the woman in the wallpaper. According to Welter, "religion or piety was central to the woman's life." virtue, source of his strength” (44), because if they were pious, “everything else would follow” (44). In a patriarchal society, religion was valued in the cult of true femininity because it did not distance women from the home (Welter 45). In Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator's husband, John, plays a divine character to whom the narrator is devoted. In their temporary home, “completely alone, well back from the road, five kilometers from the village” (96), the narrator is locked in her room where she devotes herself to the desires and tastes of her husband. She tells readers, at one point, "there's John, I have to put this away, — he has...... middle of paper...... his own destruction" (Welter 66). Even though Gilman's narrator did not possess within herself all the pillars of true femininity, people who imposed and succumbed to the pressures of those pillars surrounded her. Seeing these people around her and the lives they were living didn't do anything to her. She didn't want to be trapped in her home, acting like a servant taking care of her family. She didn't want to reform herself into the ideal woman wrapped in Jennie and Mary. Removing the Wallpaper challenged society's patriarchal ideologies, showing that women can move beyond constructions of true femininity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" simultaneously illustrates and challenges the ideals of true womanhood described by Barbara Welter in "The Cult of True Womanhood", its ultimate outcome being the opportunity and possibility to end the oppression of women..