Women In The Bean Trees By Barbara Kingsolver

When people are asked to imagine the struggles of day to day lives, they predominantly think about not having enough gasoline for their cars or embarrassing oneself in front of others. What is often over looked is the harassment and hypersexualization of women all over the world, twenty-four seven, seven days a week. Barbara Kingsolver in her work of fiction, The Bean Trees, has given readers all over the world an insight of few realistic women’s struggles in the revolutionized world. The book follows main character Taylor Greer as she deals with having an unknown baby handed to her through starting over her life. She learns the real world through an unshielded window. Problems from finding childcare to dealing with legal problems. Kingsolver’s

In particular, Taylor found Mattie running an automotive shop (Jesus is Lord Used Tires) which gave her an example to stand up for equality. “I had never seen a woman with this kind of know-how. It made me feel proud, somehow. In Pittman if a woman had tried to have her own tire store she would have been run out of business.” (Kingsolver, 44). From this intendent Taylor realizes a woman can do more than cook and cleaning work. The diction Kingsolver uses is of plain informing text. There is no biasness from the way Tylor was explaining Mattie’s work. Here, Taylor realizes how much it is important to know all basic skills that aren’t just feminine. This directly proves a lot of women don’t have people like Mattie as a role model; this is why the world needs feminism. It helps women be strong independent women. With this thought in mind, later on in the book Taylor takes up a job there. At this point of the book Jesus is Lord Used Tires is the place Taylor now works at: the same shop Mattie runs. “But there is no steering Mattie off her course. She was positive I’d be a natural at tires... In many ways it was the perfect arrangement” (Kingsolver, 78). Taylor takes up the job because she will gain

It is the equality of all genders. This is shown in the first chapter when Taylor found Turtle sexually abused. “When I pulled off the pants and the diapers there were more bruises. Bruises and worse. The Indian child was a girl… I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl” (Kingsolver, 23). This quote is a major turning point in the book. Some speculate if Taylor had never seen the bruises and the signs of abuse, she might have taken the kid to the police. Seeing the child in such despair, Kingsolver uses tone to send her message. Abuse of any kind is not ethically correct and should be stopped. The author wrote this part of the book in a hazy kind of way making it seem Taylor doesn’t believe it. What is even more shocking being the number of women to this day that gets abused. "This ‘one in five’ statistic shouldn’t just be taken with a grain of salt but the entire shaker," said James Fox, professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University (Washington Post, 2014) The ‘one in five’ statistic he is speaking about is one in five women get sexually harassed in college (Obama, 2014). This small quote speaks humongous words. As it says in the quote, “one in five,” women get sexually harassed in college and that shows that women aren’t looked at as strong and agile people because