Hidden Figures: What Was Life Like For Black Women In The 1960s

Hidden Figures: What Was Life Like for Black Women in the 1960s

Imagine if you were a black woman in the 1960s, things weren’t always as easy as they seemed, you would get turned down from many job opportunities and have the smallest things happen, like not being allowed in a library, wouldn’t that make you mad? That’s exactly how many black women felt in the 1960s. The story of Hidden Figures is about black woman fighting against segregation. Some different ways that that was happening was People not letting colored people in libraries and people not being able to find a bathroom because they needed a colored bathroom. The movie and the book tell the story of hidden figures differently by the movie contributing dialogue , and the book contributing

In the movie, there is a scene where Katherine comes into work and her boss is mad at her for spending so much time using the bathroom but kathrine explains that there are no colored bathrooms nearby. The dialogue is shown when The boss is yelling at her asking why it takes her 40 minutes just to use the bathroom and Katherine gives a monologue about how the only bathroom that she can use is very far walk and she’s not even allowed to use the bikes to get there. This element shows the audience that probably a lot of black people got fired from their jobs because they would have to leave work multiple times a day for long periods of time just to use the bathroom. This injustice shows up In the movie because of the dialogue.

The book tells the story using chronological order. In chapter 20, the book says quotes like,“and she worked there from 1957 to 1958.”“years later [in February 1960]” and “The next month,” and Uses a lot of transition words like

“The following day,” This structure helps tell a story about black woman by showing the order in which things happen, telling us dates, and letting the reader know if one thing happened after another. The book does this to help the audience picture the timeline of when all these things happened. This text structure in the book helps the reader to understand how far apart things happened from one another or how often and un Often these things

Before knowing the story of hidden figures I already knew that black people were not treated the same as white people in the 60s and also for many years before that, but this story helped emphasize black women and how even just black women themselves were treated worse than black men and how it can affect their jobs. This helps me to understand that I should not take the privileges that I have for granted because many people have had to suffer and fight for us just so that we have the rights that they never got. The story of hidden figures also helped show me that there were many other factors of thing s that black woman didn't have rights for and how it made there life very hard, like how alot of black people couldnt even use the bathroom at work and how it was much harder for them to get hired for important jobs then I thought. After reading and watching hidden figures I know a lot more about how hard it was for black women in the 1960s than I did