Toomer's Cane: The Struggles Of African American Women

The Characters of Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” reveals how Differing personalities can create fissures in family ties, their personal choices shaping each other and the feelings they have about one another. The Narrator (Mrs. Johnson) is a practical, hardworking woman whose unconditional love is pushed to the limits. In the fifth paragraph she is directly described to be a big boned uneducated woman of color who is proud of whom she is. She is brutally honest in her judgments in both of her daughters, however less so to Maggie.

The novel starts off with an injured Confederate soldier, Inman, from the Battle of Fredericksburg. Inman was tended at a hospital but decides to leave at night to return to his lover, Ada Monroe, at Cold Mountain, North Carolina. Ada on the other hand did not live a glorious life at home. Her father soon dies and she is left to take over her father’s farm called the Black Cove. With the help of her friend, Ruby, the two women worked to make the farm in good condition.

First Generations: Women of Colonial America, written by Carol Berkin, is a novel that took ten years to make. Carol Berkin received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has worked as a consultant on PBS and History Channel documentaries. Berkin has written several books on the topic of women in America. Some of her publications include: Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence (2004) and Civil War Wives: The Life and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant (2009).

Outline: Views on the African-American Situation The three texts all deal with subject of the African-American situation in the present America. A lot have changed in America since the civil rights movement began in the 60’s. A black president is leading the country, but has that at all affected the general view on African-Americans? The texts all raise the same questions: what has changed?

The poem Sugar Cane by Grace Nichols and The painting Cane Cutting Scene have similarities and differences. One similarity is that they are both about slaves growing sugar cane. “it is us who groom and weed him” (Nichols 32). The painting also shows slaves growing and harvesting sugar cane. Another similarity is that the slaves suffer and go through pain while working.

An obstacle that my mother has faced is being Black Muslim women in America. It 's more of a problem than what reaches the surface and mainstream media. It 's rarely talked about in America. In america there are people who want to smear our entire faith and say that Islam is an inherently violent religion. These are exciting times to be an American Muslim.

African American women make up eight percent of the United States population, the women in this minority group deal with negative and positive stereotypes on a daily basis. These stereotypes are apparent within mainstream media. With today’s children having more access to media. now more than ever, they are subjected to these stereotypes at a young age (Adams-Bass, Bentley-Edwards, & Stevenson, 2014, n.p.). When blacks have more Afrocentric features like thick lips, bigger noses, or a darker skin tone, they are more likely to have a negative stereotype towards them (Conrad, Dixon, & Zhang, 2009, n.p.).

Since the book is centered around the theme ‘Racial prejudices were impactful on the lives of people in the American South’, the setting is important because the South was once fighting for the right to own slaves, and was still holding those prejudices against different races. Therefore the setting is very important to the theme of this novel due to large racial problems in Southern America because people were segregated, lived in small towns away from white society, and were faced with unfair penalties.

In 1974 Shirley Chisholm was picked to be the keynote speaker at a national conference for black women at the University of Missouri. In her speech "The Black Woman in Contemporary America" Chisholm expresses to her audience that black women are not interested in being addressed as "Ms." or in gaining more control over things than males, but rather African American women's top priority is the well-being of their families and communities. Being that this speech was giving during the era of the Civil Rights movement, Chisholm criticized white feminist. While she went into depth of how important it is for black and white women to unite around issues such as equal treatment, women's rights, and better job opportunities. The main focus of this speech

Walker revisits her homeland through fiction in what may be centered on a protagonist who returns home. The way life in the community was perceived is in plain and black and straight forward. The two daughters take divergent paths as Maggie is less educated and it is in her mother’s opinion that she will soon be married to have her own house. She is humble, takes life in an easier and simpler way.

Dating back to World War II the United States was immensely preoccupied with the war front. Their continuous worry about having enough ammunition put many people to work. Around the 1940s, many individuals were asked to work jobs they usually would not have been offered. There was a simple phase of false hope for the struggling families. Readers have had a chance to see the reality behind the era of World War II through the documents left behind in Chapter 13: Gender, Race, and Sexuality During World War II of Sharon Block’s book Major Problems in American History Volume II: Since 1865 and also Chapter 8: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement of Thomas Holt’s book Major Problems in African American History.

The excerpt I chose to reflect on is called “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” by Claudia Jones (1949). Jones express the concerns that women of color in her time suffer from the neglect and degradation they receive throughout their lives. During this time, the reason many African American women go through the struggles in their community originated from the notion that the “bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman” (108). In my opinion, they have every right to be afraid of African American women. As Jones stated nicely "once Negro women undertake action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced" (108).

The story takes place at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, when desegregation is finally achieved. Flannery O’Connor’s use of setting augments the mood and deepens the context of the story. However, O’Connor’s method is subtle, often relying on connotation and implication to drive her point across. The story achieves its depressing mood mostly through the use of light and darkness in the setting.

The profound novel, The Help, can be interpreted as having many themes and subliminal messages about life, but to truly understand the meaning of them, the conflicting points must be recognized. Due to the fact that the setting of the novel is during segregation, the friction between blacks and whites is what creates the novel. Although it is easily recognizable that one of the main conflicts is segregation, there is a major conflict between two prominent characters, Hilly and Skeeter, wealthy white women. Some of the issues within this novel lye in location and the social aspects of living in a small southern town in that time. There are several underlying conflicts in The Help, but the main one that sets up all the themes are the conflicts

A young college graduate, Skeeter, returns home to be with her ailing mother, and in her ambition to succeed as a writer, turns to the black maids she knows. Skeeter is determined to collect their oral histories and write about a culture that values social facade and ignores the human dignity of many members of the community. Two maids, Aibileen and Minny, agree to share their stories, stories of struggle and daily humiliation, of hard work and low pay, of fear for themselves. It is a time of change, when