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Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

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In America, women’s rights has been a controversial and powerful movement that has caused women everywhere to stand up for what they believe in. Throughout time many civil rights movements have increased, decreased or haven’t changed at all in progression. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry depicts how ideas of women’s rights have not been seen as a crucial issue and is often laughed off. The steady movement of women’s equality of rights has slowly changed for the better over the years. In the play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry proves women being equal to men in the workplace has progressed very little as displayed in the lack of development of women’s rights today. Mama’s mindset of women’s rights in A Raisin in the Sun is the perfect …show more content…

You might think that there has been enough change due to women having the right to vote, or being able to have more freedom since years ago but the little progression it has had says otherwise. Women in the workplace has been unthinkable every since the 1800s. Mama in the play shows this unthinkable mindset when she shrugs the idea of Beneatha being a doctor. As demonstrated here, this is how people often thought of women working back in the 1900s, “Employ women in jobs for pay outside their homes?...These and other issues that were once considered scandalous and unthinkable are now almost universally accepted in this country”(Eisenberg 1). This was the idea of women back in the early 1900s. Today women are able to get jobs and are able to get a lot more freedom in what they choose to be in life. However, this isn’t necessarily progress when women are still making less than men. “An International Labour Organisation (ILO) study of 83 countries found that women earn 10%-30% less than men. Even in the US in 2010, women working full-time still earned only 77% of the male wage”(Van der Gaag 1). As revealed through both quotes, women working has definitely progressed but are still not as equal as men. Women are getting paid but are still earning a lot less that their male competitors. It shows that even over 100 years, women’s rights are still

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Dream chaser. Hard worker. Untrustworthy. Characters with these traits will either learn to succeed in life or their bad decisions will get them nowhere. In A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry shows the life of an African American man in the 1950s.

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In Tracy’s satirical essay, “An Enlightened, Humble Proposal,” she begins with a monologue, presenting the matter at hand: gender inequality in the workplace. She makes notes of how far women have come since the women’s suffrage and equality movement in the twentieth century, but makes it clear that it is not enough. In doing so, the author pulls the reader in with a false sense of security in believing that this essay will speak kindly and logically on the matter of gender inequality as she presents no clear indication that it is a satirical essay. The author continues to feed the reader with tangible statistics on workplace inequality and gives a superficial voice to her intended audience—working women—in order to make it appear that the

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There is no question that women have struggled over many years to be seen as equals by their male counterparts. Years of struggle and oppression continued throughout time, but the oppression took different forms over the course of history. Susan Glaspell wrote, “Trifles” which explores a woman’s status in society during the 1920s and the political leanings that perverted society at the time. The play demonstrates how women were subjected to mental abuse and viewed as intellectually inferior as dictated by American society and politics. “Trifles” exposes how political leanings in the government favored and enabled a patriarchal society as well as displaying how the Women’s Rights movement was beginning to combat these prejudices.

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In February of 1963, Friedan, a feminist author, published The Feminine Mystique, a novel that challenged traditional gender norms and inspired women to fight for the eradication of these stereotypical positions (Miller 279). Friedan’s novel became instrumental in the feminist movement. Her novel “helped shape feminism in the 1960s through its discussion of how the domestic sphere of motherhood, for educated women like herself, was akin to a ‘cultural concentration camp’” (Schneider). After the incredible success of her novel in creating conversation about women’s rights, in 1964, Friedan helped form NOW, a group that focused on resolving equity issues such as equal pay and equal work opportunities in male-dominated fields like medicine, higher education, and law (Schneider).

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Now that everyone has the right to vote and allowed the same civil rights and liberties, the Country is where it wants to be. After passing the Equal Pay Act of 1963 women receive the same wages as men do. Even some women are presidents of companies and in higher status then some of their men coworkers. Even though there are still people who believe that women should not be head of the work place.

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Even though women worked in the same factories as men, they were still separated from each other. This indicates how men really despised women and thought that women had no intelligence. Women who supported the suffrage movement started to educate the public about the strengths of a woman, and the suffragist protested and petitioned against and the Congress to ratify amendments that gives women their rights. Even though the single story about women’s right has changed drastically since the suffrage movement, women still struggle daily in equality with men in our present time. In our present time, women are able to vote, work as the same position as men, and have personal

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In the United States the past 88 years’ women have been fighting for change by protesting for the equal rights that they deserve. Even though they were given job and education opportunities they were not being treated equally in the past. Virginia Woolf mentions in Shakespeare’s Sister that women were limited, beat, and had no saying in anything. In this essay, I will argue that not much has changed for women in the United States; they are still fighting for human rights today such as: equal pay, not to be discriminated, and not to be brutalized. Equal pay is still a struggle for women of all races in the United States today.

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According to Andrea Kramer and Alton Harris, Northwestern University School of Law writers, women are expected to agree to do more tasks, no matter how menial, in order to prove their worth and work ethic. Similar to the dynamics from the past reported by WIC, women are not respected in the workplace unless they perform more tasks than men do; only by outperforming them are women able to be seen as equal to them (Kramer). While this work ethic is almost required of women to succeed, “[successful women] are applauded for delivering results at work but then reprimanded for being ‘too aggressive,’ ‘out for herself,’ ‘difficult,’ and ‘abrasive,’” as claimed by Marianne Cooper, a sociologist with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Thus, women could only succeed if they worked more, but those who did were prevented from moving up in society due to sexist ideas of powerful women being a threat to men. In “A World Without Work,” by Northwestern University journalism graduate Derek Thompson, explains how women remain more involved with society when they are unemployed, while men “are more likely to withdraw into their living rooms when they become unemployed.”

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Now women are lawyers, engineers, mechanics, computer programmers, and other jobs that have been primarily male dominated for years. Although sexism has been a key problem in the working industry, as evidenced by putting women in lower paying jobs, women today are putting an end by joining the women's movement pushing this issue into the mainstream media and increasing the worlds awareness on an issue that has been around for centuries. Although there were no movements specifically for women's rights to work there were movements for women's rights as a whole. As history tells, men did not believe women had the

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This progress deserves to be underlined, and even honored. Nevertheless, inequalities remain, and some have even amplified. And, there is still a considerable gap between the wages of men and women. Moreover, they don't have the same advantages in the labor market, especially since the woman has returned to it much later and is beginning to assert herself, with still much struggle. Women are always subjected to more discrimination and unemployment on a daily basis than men.

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