The Lottery

The Lottery is a short story by Shirley Jackson. It was first published in the The New Yorker in 1948. The story is about a small American village having their annual lottery. There is a special box used only for the annual lottery. In the box, there are small pieces of paper, with one piece having a black dot in the middle. The head of each house draws the small piece of paper, and Bill Hutchinson receives the paper with the black dot. Each person in the Hutchinson family draws and whoever gets the paper with the black dot "wins" the lottery. At the end of the story, Tessie Hutchinson, Bill's wife, receives the paper with the black dot and "wins" the lottery. The prize of the lottery was being stoned.
Stoning is a form of capital punishment that involves people throwing stones at the convicted until he or she dies. Stoning has been used for a long time, and still happens today in our society. In the story The Lottery, the person who "won" the lottery could have been a man or a woman, or even a child, but in the real world, stoning affects women the most. Most of the time, women are being stoned for a crime with no evidence. Stoning is not the only brutal abuse women suffer. Some abuses include: bride burning, bride kidnapping, honor killing, female genital mutilation and human trafficking. Because of the brutality of stoning and other abuses women suffer, I chose Violence against Women as the theme.

Bride Kidnapping