Ruth, Lena, and Beneatha represent a very oppressed minority, African American women. Raisin in the Sun has a lot of social and economic conflicts within the play and the characters are representing a race that is being harshly treated in the midst of the Civil Rights and Woman’s Rights struggle.
Woman’s rights is something that women are battling today. I was once told, by my employer’s bookkeeper, I was making woman’s wages, which I thought I was making pretty good money. I never thought that a man doing my same job, would be getting paid more than me. Women continue to battle an inequality between men and woman’s earnings, in the same positions, in today’s society. I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like living in the 1950s and being discriminated against by Caucasians for the color of your skin and African American men because of your gender.
During the 50s, both women and African Americans were having a hard time being heard. They had to demand their rights, but African American Women fell right in the middle of a venn diagram of the Civil Rights movements.They had the toughest time being dually discriminated against. They had the white community looking down on them for the color of their skin and husbands oppressing their wives and not treating them like equal partners. When Ruth tells her son,Travis, they do not …show more content…
Wilkerson essay, “Hansberry’s Awareness of Culture and Gender”, she makes a very powerful point when she says, “With the statement “I was born black and a female,” Hansberry immediately established the basis for a tension that informed her world view. Her consciousness, of both ethnicity and gender from the very beginning, brought awareness of two key forces of conflict and oppression in the contemporary world,” (Wilkerson 384). Through Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry, shows us glimpses into the lives of African American women and how the women are more open when alone and more reserved and when they are in the presence of a