Women In To Kill A Mockingbird

Imagine a world where women are inferior, black people are barely considered humans at all, and the poor are described as savages. Most people today will agree that a society like that is not one they would want to be a part of. Less than a century ago, these were some of the most welcomed mindsets, that today we consider heavy prejudice and hold mostly adverse feelings about. Throughout Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the prejudice of the 1930s is illustrated in a way that shows how it was exponentially worse than it is today, though it is still a minute issue; it is pronounced in the way women are viewed, the difference in treatment between social classes, and the attitudes towards black people. To begin, women were treated very

Not only were black people facing heavy prejudice, they also did not enjoy the same rights that their white counterparts enjoyed freely. For this reason, black people, as shown in the novel, did not stand a chance against any white person in a court at the time. Atticus stated, after working on Tom’s case for some time, that even though he was fighting a losing battle, he would continue to fight anyway. He says, “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win” (101). As unfair as that statement is, it is the truth. Atticus refers to how racial prejudice allows for not even a fighting chance for black people. Atticus uses the means of being fated to defend Tom as a grounds to make even the slightest progress on the views of many of the prejudiced citizens of Maycomb that attend the trial. There were also negative effects on the white people that mingled with black people. Shunning their family members or friends is how many people handled the people that supported negroes. Francis mocks Scout for Atticus’s defending Tom Robinson. Francis attacks Scout verbally by saying how Atticus is “ruining the family, that’s what he’s doing. … He’s nothing but a nigger-lover” (110). With this abuse of Scout, the author displays how even families turned on each other when it came to the issue of racial differences and prejudices. People held so many negative thoughts and ideas about black people that they would willingly outcast one of their own kin, even in a time when a family is a valued and a closely knit