To Satisfy the Desires of Women:
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by Linda Gordon
Linda Gordon uses her book The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction to show racial, gender, class, and religious issues in Arizona during the early 1900s. This novel, at first, seems to be about the orphan train that ran from New York City to Arizona. However, the title is misleading, as it suggests to the reader that the novel is focusing on the orphans. Rather, Gordon uses the orphans as a lens through which one can view the inequalities between the people in Arizona.
The novel begins when forty orphans are put on an orphan train and sent to Clifton-Morenci, two mining towns on the United States’ side of the Arizonan-Mexican border. The children had adoptive
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In each of the issues presented in the book, from race, class, and religion, the women of these Arizona towns play an important role, thus it is safe to assume that it is Gordon’s intention to emphasize the women’s function. First, before being able to examine the women’s role in the titular abductions, it is important to note the women’s role in society. Gordon succinctly clarifies this role by writing, “Not only did men long for women, they longed for wives, and the presence of a few women only intensified that feeling.” Women were highly regarded in this society, as there were so few of them. Because of this, the men who were able to find wives were easily susceptible to the woman’s persuasion because they had a desire to please them. This already fixed opinion of women’s place in society became even more established during the orphan abductions. While women were previously highly regarded, the abductions became a primary reason why their importance grew. Gordon supports this idea when she writes, “the women took the initiative in this undertaking, defining it as belonging within their sphere of authority, and that, in taking the initiative, they enlarged that sphere.” The women, by taking control over …show more content…
Women were incredibly important primarily because of their ability to persuade their husbands to participate in the vigilantism behind the abductions. Religion was important, as it became a major justification during the trial for these abductions. All in all, Gordon is successful in highlighting the various issues by looking through the lens of the orphan abductions, and proves through this book that the women were not only the cause of the abductions, but also the reason why these Arizonan towns were filled with racial inequalities, class issues, and religious
Linda Gordon gives a micro-history of the 1904 orphan kidnapping incident which happened in the Arizona mining town Clifton/Morenci. A historian at NYU, Linda uses her background as a historian of women and feminism to address nationalism, race, and identity on the frontier in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Gordon focuses on race relations and their construction between the “Mexican and Anglo” inhabitants. In her argument locals created racial polarization between Anglos and Mexicans based on economics which helped produce perceived binaries. The book is organized very uniquely.
The straggles of the kids whose parents are not at home a whole lot are shown in the novel Williwaw. Which is written by Tom Bodett and published in 1999, is a story about two kids from Alaska, Ivan and September who are 12 and 13 years old, they got into the trouble because they did not follow their dads rules. The main theme “challenges of life” can clearly be seen within the novel Williwaw. For Ivan and September challenges of taking care for themselves means staying at home alone for several weeks because their father is not home and their mother died a few years ago. That means that they have to look after themselves and stay out of the troubles and the most important follow their dads rules.
The novel, Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix, is mainly about two boys, Jonah and Chip. The adolescent Jonah Skidmore, feels like an average kid, with an intelligent but slightly annoying younger sister named Katherine. The fact that Jonah is adopted has never been a big deal for him, maybe due to his parents always being very open and reassuring about it. To Jonah, life feels normal. That is, until the letter arrives.
To start, both of the passages talk about how the miners had a difficult time trying to find the gold. The passage called A Woman Who Went to Alaska is about the struggles with the government and the government’s rules. For instance, anyone whos wants to dig for gold must get a miners permit. Also, if a man discovers anything and he wants to claim the location he must go to a recorders office. After, the recorders office will send men to go examine the location.
First Generations: Women of Colonial America, written by Carol Berkin, is a novel that took ten years to make. Carol Berkin received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has worked as a consultant on PBS and History Channel documentaries. Berkin has written several books on the topic of women in America. Some of her publications include: Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence (2004) and Civil War Wives: The Life and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant (2009).
In the late nineteenth century and the mid twentieth century, the plague of lynching that fascinated the Southern conditions of America, decades after the Civil War and the finish of subjugation, speaks to one of the darkest stains upon American history, that has frequently been the subject of history literature. Lynch law, as Flora and MacKethan state, alludes to common residents, who accept the privilege to execute individuals they judge blameworthy of a specific wrongdoing. The wrongdoing in these cases was frequently "just being an African American" and lynching here represents the "procedure of doing the judgment" (464). Activists like Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass went up against the assignment of recording such despicable practices, of these Southern abhorrences. Frederick Douglass portrays what lynching law implied as well as the impacts and slants it brings out as takes after: “Think of an American woman, in this year of grace 1892, mingling with a howling mob, and with her own hand applying the torch to the fagots around the body of a negro condemned to death without a trial, and without judge or jury, as was done only a few weeks ago in the so-called civilized State of Arkansas.
This novel talks about the life in America during those times back in 1937 how many people struggled to live. Many people during those days lost their jobs. There was no welfare state or unemployment benefit. Disabled or old people had to depend on their families or charity and keep working for as long as they could. Everyone was so competitive in order to get a job.
In the book Ar’n’t I a women the author, Deborah Gray White, explains how the life was for the slave women in the Southern plantations. She reveals to us how the slave women had to deal with difficulties of racism as well as dealing with sexism. Slave women in these plantations assumed roles within the family as well as the community; these roles were completely different to the roles given to a traditional white female. Deborah Gray White shows us how black women had a different experience from the black men and the struggle they had to maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds, resist sexual oppression, and keep their families together. In the book the author describes two different types of women, “Jezebel” and “Mammy” they
Her obdurate rejection of the 1900’s misogyny, racism, and classism intrigues all those around her, sparking an obtuse hatred and fear among her neighbors. However, amidst the antipathy, love and camaraderie infuse itself into the town’s identity, “They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band
Throughout the course of the book, Janie experiences oppression as a woman, revealing the hidden gender roles in American society that help form the American
To be specific, she situates the imminent feminist struggle by highlighting the legacy of slavery among black people, and black women in particular. “Black women bore the terrible burden of equality in oppression” (Davis). Due to her race, her writing focuses on what she understood and ideas that are relevant to black females. Conversely, since white men used black women in domestic labor and forcefully rape these individuals. These men used this powerful weapon to remind black women of their female and vulnerability.
“Motherhood is somewhat difficult for a slave like Roxy because children of slave women were legally slaves, regardless of the status of their fathers” (Rasmussen 199). Although her love for her child is unceasing, it is her decisions that, eventually, bring him into
Through the eyes of a young girl, an intricate story of an African American family in the 1950’s is told in Mildred D. Taylor’s The Gold Cadillac. Set in Toledo, Ohio, Taylor details the ‘s family’s journey with just a gold Cadillac and a road trip to the southern United States. Along the way, ‘Lois’ childlike innocence takes a hit once the realities of racism become part of her world.
In addition to that, the black community isolated Sethe because she did something that the community considered wrong. Black feminism will be the approach utilized here to see the oppression of woman of color because it includes sexism, classism and racism. Since the female characters are very dominant in the novel, a black feminist approach should be very effective and it enables one to see how the female characters deal with the past and live with it in the present, what motherhood mean to the female characters, and how much the past influences the female characters who lives in the present. The end of the novel reveals the forgiveness and the acceptance not only of the black community toward Sethe’s choice (killing her daughter) but also of the white people (the Bodwins) who accepted Denver to work for them. This reconciliation shows that the courage and the will to get rid off from the past to live side by side peacefully and to move toward the future together.
A constant comparison and contrast between Maggie and Dee is prominent structural feature of the narrative. This structural strategy helps in conceptualizing the plurality of female experience within the same milieu. This strategy encapsulates another dimension of womanism, viz. , womanism refuses to treat black woman as a homogeneous monolith. Unlike feminist position, womanism is sensitive to change with time.