Kate Chopin was the voice of many women at a time when their voices were suppressed and silenced. Being widowed in the late 1800s and raising six children influenced Kate Chopin's writing about women in society. Kate was surrounded by a family of strong widowed women, including her grandmother and mother. Chopin made his writings a window into his life experiences and opinions and described them in his plots and characters. She embodied in her writings the influence of the times in which she lived, where women were often inferior to men and sexual desires were inappropriate. In the stories "A Pair of Silk Stockings", "A Respectable Woman", "The Tempest" and "At the Cadian Ball", Chopin maintains a balance. The main characters, Mrs. Sommers unexpectedly has fifteen dollars and plans to spend it on herself. children. When she goes shopping, she begins to fend for herself. Instead, Mrs. Sommers spends this money on herself trying to enjoy the freedom she had before she got married. "The neighbors sometimes talked about some 'better days' that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she even thought about being Mrs. Sommers" (A Pair of Silk Stockings 1). She tries to regain her identity lost during her marriage. After Mrs. Sommers bought the silk stockings, she felt happy and "liberated from all responsibility" as if she had just days before she became Mrs. Sommers (A Pair of Silk Stockings 2). She then continued to treat herself after purchasing the silk stockings. At the end of the story, Mrs. Sommers feels an emptiness as she returns home and her short-lived freedom to please herself. Sommers is a wife and mother, she can no longer enjoy the things she used to and can no longer put herself first. Even if she wanted to run away, she would eventually have to take back her responsibilities. In the article "The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Feminism in Kate Chopin's 'A Pair of Silk Stockings'" by Kristin B. Valentine and Janet Larsen Palmer, she expresses the idea of ​​a balanced life and ability to sacrifice and please oneself; "The feminist position of "A Pair of Silk Stockings" is not that self-satisfaction should replace self-sacrifice, but that the two states should be balanced in a woman's life. Too much self-sacrifice leads to the self-effacement of “little Mrs..