A surprising feminest story from Steinbeck

Read a # of good stories yesterday from 3 very different writers of the same approximate era (1930-40s), each totally different, even unique (as are most great writers in any genre, btw): John Stinbeck, Frank O'Connor, Richard Wright; won't post in detail about all three - a white American, an Irishman, and a black American - today most likely but maybe more on ech in coming days. Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums was the biggest surprise, to me, of the group - had his familiar Central Valley California (Salinas Valley specifically setting) but the surprise was the narrative sensitivity and particularly the viewpoint - it's a pretty strong feminist story, not something see often from American male writers of that era and certainly not from Steinback. His career was firmly established the the epochal Grapes of Wrath, which I know changed many hearts and minds in the country at the time and for years later, helping people to see that farmers, and others, suffering from great poverty were not victims of laziness or ineptitude, and not even truly victims of fate - but of forces that we condone in America, labor exploitation and militant monopoly capitalism, forces we can do something about - we need a 21st-century Steinbeck! Sadly, despite (because of?) the Nobel, his career spiraled downward, with a lot of mediocre novels, and with his jingoistic support for the Vietnam War. Travels w/ Charley was a nice break and career-revival piece, but posthumously there has been lots of criticsm noting how much of this so called travelogue was invented or greatly distorted. Anyway, Chrysantemums focuses on a farm woman very adept at planting the eponymous flowers; a man traveling alone on a "covered" wagon who claims to be lost passes by her farm, seeks directions, and then asks for some work - he sharpens blades. She refuses (but does give him some shoots of the plants w/ instructions on how to lay them in the soil) and later relents, brings him some pots to bang into shape. (There's one sentence in the story that suggests he took off w/ the pots, but I don't understand how that could be.) Later in the evening, as she's riding into town w/ her husband for a rare dinner out and movie, they pass the man's wagon - and she has a deep, romantic yearning to live a free and lonely and independent life, such as his, but realizes she could never do so, and story ends in her soft tears. The feminism is a little heavy handed - the knife sharpener mocks her, doubts her skills and strength - but the mood of the story is an emblem and precursor for so many other stories and novels in which women yearn for a freedom too often, and cruelly, denied to them. The chrysanthemums are a great symbol as well: suggesting that she is confined to decorative chores, not the manly chores (selling cattle) that bring money into the family - and freedom to do things like take a dinner in town (and go to the fights - which the husband jokingly suggests and she dismisses but perhaps wants to do, secretly).