The Role Of Women In Tyrese Coleman's How To Sit

How do the roles of women in society reflect how they are expected to act, speak, dress, and conduct themselves? For example, women are generally expected to dress and act in a feminine manner by being polite, accommodating, and nurturing to others. However, as seen in Tyrese Coleman's powerful story, “How to Sit”, the grandmother is perceived as a wild, selfish, and fiercely independent woman, who is forced to harass her granddaughter in order to shape her as the woman she wishes she could still be. The narrator describes her actions toward her granddaughter as cruel although they are done with a great deal of tenderness. She is, in a way, teaching the lesson of harnessing sex to have a power that transcends race. Furthermore, age is relative—some women may look and feel younger than their years, or they might seem a lot older than they actually are. This does not mean that just because they have celebrated a certain number of birthdays, they can act beyond their age or be “pre-mature”. Coleman's story discusses the relationships between three

The grandmother displaces her ideas that sitting like that (legs crossed) is an indication of an imminent doom that her granddaughter will face, just like how her daughter, and herself came to be. How she has lived her life when she was younger, was something that she felt would most often than not become a pattern among women. The reality she has lived scared her, and was a victim of her circumstance. She felt that she didnt have the power to change her situation, and thus thats what she predicted upon her kin. The granddaughter as young as she is has her own eyes, budding paradigm and hope. This presented the fact that women have the power to rise above circumstances, and have the courage to take a step towards a better and brighter future through not repeating the same mistakes all over