Lady Macbeth's View of Women

Elizabethan women are better seen than heard, an idea that surfaces in many of Shakespeare's plays.  Although some of the strong female characters portrayed in these stories would disagree with this idea, such as Kate Minola in The Taming of the Shrew, there are others who see this opinion as their reality.

In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is an essential character; she has a great deal of power that amounts to her being the driving force of the play.  However, there is one particular spot in the play where she indicates that women are the weaker gender:

"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, 

To cry 'Hold, hold!'"

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

In the passage above, Lady Macbeth asks the spirits to "unsex" her.  She is asking the spirits to give her power to commit Duncan's murder, and make her cruel and impervious to emotions; to do so, she believes that she cannot be a woman.  Lady Macbeth also asks for the spirits to turn her breast milk to poison.  Women were generally believed to represent kindness and good, so she must shed these characteristics to be able to do as she pleases, which in this instance requires opposing behavior.