What is Steinbeck's portrayal of women in Of Mice and Men? Steinbeck's portrayal of women in Of Mice and Men is hardly complimentary, and his...

If authors wrote only about nice women, literature would
be bland and uninteresting. It would also be dishonest.

It's the troubled and flawed among us who provide drama, who create problems to solve
and issues with which to wrestle. Besides, stories are not intended to be balanced
treatises on womanhood or any other issue. They're stories, not essays, and literature
is not a parlor.

And yet "misogynist" has been thrown at
Steinbeck more than once because he didn't shrink from showing the negative aspects of
women rather than idealizing them, as "gentlemen" were trained to do in the day. A
careful reading of his work and his correspondence shows he was the opposite of
misogynistic. He was exceptionally respectful of women, particularly his mother, despite
her domineering posture toward both him and his kind-hearted father. (Both Steinbeck and
Hemingway had domineering mothers and passive fathers.) 

Steinbeck
wrote what he saw. He was a realist who faced social tabus courageously. He wrote about
prostitutes because they were so common in his post-Victorian world, and he wrote about
them without the hypocritic harsh judgement and disdain that was also prevalent. THAT
would have been misogynistic.

In the character of Ma Joad in THE
GRAPES OF WRATH, he showed a character who was stoic, heroic even. In the character of
the waitress who sold the loaf of bread at a reduced price, he showed both the woman's
hard side and her gentleness. In the case of Rosasharon, he showed a woman who was weak,
complaining and male-dependent, but who had hopes for a better future, redeeming herself
by offering a starving man milk from her breast. In EAST OF EDEN' Cathy, Steinbeck
showed a woman capable of monstrous cruelty, yet not without some kindness toward the
sons she abandoned at birth. I have little doubt this woman actually existed. Steinbeck
is hated to this day in the social establishment of Salinas and Monterrey for exposing
the socially powerful to scrutiny.

Steinbeck had no ax to grind about
women. If, as in the case of Curley's wife, he shows a woman's cruelty, it's because it
was there and he'd seen it. He simply held up a mirror to society so we could see
ourselves objectively.

Nevertheless, people will always read into his
work whatever prejudices they, themselves, carry.