Mary Mcleod Bethune Women's Rights

Women played a key role during the Civil Rights Movement, as political and social player. While men thought women were decreasing their actions and their impacts because they were fighting for more personal rights, or at least more focused on women rights. Some of them did a lot for the entire Black community. Mary McLeod Bethune did a lot for her community. According to the biography ‘Mary Jane McLeod Bethune.’ published by the A&E Television Networks, she was born in 1875 in Maysville in South Carolina from a former slave family; she lived her childhood in poverty, picking cotton in the croplands. Graduated from a girl school, education was for her “the key to racial advancement” (10-11). In 1904, she founded the ‘Daytona Normal and

She also became in 1936 the « Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration » (73-76). Finally, she finished her actions for the black community but moreover for black women when she helped the NAACP at the conference of 1945 on the subject: the foundation of the United Nations. Along her life, she never stopped giving her help and ideas to improve the Black condition in the US. Then, Rosa Parks is one of the most famous and recognized woman of the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1913 in Alabama, her refusal to surrender her seat in a bus to a white person made her famous all around the world. One day back home after work, Rosa Parks sat in the right part of the bus, reserved to the colored people. But the drivers of the bus, who had the same authority as policemen, were required to ask Black people to let their sit in the colored part if there were too much people in the bus and thus that some Whites were standing up instead of being sat. This day, the bus was full of people and the driver asked Rosa to let her sit to a White person. She

Women’s actions were completely pressed under men’s power, under the power of the big six, which was composed of MLK, John Lewis, James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young (Dias Parr 1). And for good reason: according to the article ‘Sexism In the Civil Rights Movement: A Discussion Guide’, Martin Luther king was sexist and a complete male chauvinist: “Martin…was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets” (Parr. 2). But this gender discrimination was not only a reference for MLK: mostly all the black men were considering women this way. Women were living in a male-dominated culture where they lived behind the shadow of their husband (Parr 2). How could the Black women find their place in such an environment? Nobody would have believed at the time that MLK, the savior of the African-Americans would have treated the women that way. However, even if women’s actions were more difficult to realize and to settle because of the gender discrimination they were the victims of, it is important to remind that other black women did a lot for gender equality, even if they never get the