Quawas goes on to say that women in that time period must have the four attributions of true femininity which are "piety, purity, submission, and domesticity" (35). She argues that Gilman is committed to demolishing the "domestic sphere" and works for her own rights and those of the women around her. Gilman championed the power of femininity and fought to free herself from the stereotypical ideal of women. Quawas believes Gilman is before his time, commenting that he challenged cultural stereotypes and patriarchal assumptions, which were taboo at the time. However, for Gilman, the norm of nineteenth-century bourgeois marriage was the daily “domestic” customs of the woman and the “active” work of the man, which ensured that women remained second-class citizens to those of men. . “By showing women rebelling against the dominant feminine ideal in Victorian culture, Gilman's fiction broke with a nineteenth-century literary tradition that essentially supported domestic ideology” (Quawas 38). Gilman ignores the usual "Victorian values" such as refusing to marry or leave her husband and, instead, characterizes her heroines as gaining their own financial independence or marrying if they find a partner willing to support their children.