Kate Chopin is regularly understood as one of the earlier feminist writers in the American literary canon, even though her career predates the feminist movement by many years. Chopin, of course, is best known for her 1899 novel The Awakening, about Edna Pontellier, a married woman who developed an appetite for personal freedom, and a life more fulfilling than that of a simple domestic. Edna leaves her husband and moves into a house by herself. Like "The Storm," The Awakening foregrounds its protagonist's subjective position within a series of consummately female experiences and values female autonomy. Edna finds exercising that autonomy in her stifling society to be harrowing experience and ultimately ends up committing suicide.
It's a significantly bleaker tale than "The Storm," and the affair the novel depicts doesn't go nearly as well as the one in the short story. The Awakening's dour nature attracted a lot of negative criticism at the time. But that negative criticism was likely spurred by the fact that the novel depicts a woman whose life is checkered by a patriarchy that is losing its grip on power. The patriarch of Edna's own family, The Colonel, is depicted as losing a relatively wealthy lifestyle after the Civil War, having to give up the family farm and even his horses. Similarly, Edna's husband Léonce can't maintain his grip as the powerful one in his relationship, keeping his wife's needs and desires subordinate to his own, as Edna's desire for independence proves too strong.
In "The Storm," the patriarch figure of Calixta's own family is portrayed as a kind bud generally bumbling figure. Bobinôt seems to very palpably fear Calixta's reaction to his and Bibi's dirty clothes, and we learn that he had spent much of the time during the storm coming up with an assortment of apologies to offer his wife for being gone for so long. Even though Calixta clearly fulfills the domestic duties in the house—typical of conventional gender roles in the American family—she seems to wield the true influence over the household, setting the tone for the family moment at dinner, and showing Bobinôt that there's no need for him to apologize for being out during the storm. By exercising this power, she avoids a situation where she's particularly beholden to her husband, much less has to answer for an infidelity she just engaged in.
This is all to say that in Kate Chopin's work, the patriarchal structures and expectations are very palpable for women and sometimes crushingly overbearing. But the women in her literature openly question the power of these structures by renegotiating their roles and positions of power with the male figures in their own families—the conventional patriarchs. These women don't ask for permission, but instead act autonomously, and then men are generally depicted as just having to deal with it. Chopin was not writing from some place of fantasy. After her husband Oscar Chopin died in 1882, Kate was left to care for their six children, and lived out her days happily as a single mother in Saint Louis. She never remarried, exercising an anti-patriarchal autonomy for the rest of her life that would prove the signature of her literature.
