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Cooking In Other Women's Kitchen Summary

1651 Words7 Pages

Antonette Wade
Analysis Paper: “Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960” by Rebecca Sharpless and “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly

Wade 1 After the Civil War, African American women had thought they were going to live a life of freedom with the same benefits as their white counterparts. However, the newly freed African American women in the south had didn’t have too much money, barely had education and racism impacted every one of their lives. The change from being slaves to being free was a difficult and worrisome thing for most black women who lived through the enslavement knowing "that what they got wasn't what they wanted; it wasn't freedom, really."
African American …show more content…

It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot”(pg.108.Shetterly). Mary Jackson had showed the young girls at the Girl Scouts that they be/do anything and shouldn’t believe the negative stereotypes about themselves and other African Americans. She had told them that but yet she was being treated less than her white counterparts. During the 1960s, a time when racial segregation was the law of the land, and gender discrimination was still normal. In Virginia, where the story takes place, local Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and discrimination against African-Americans, who were legally obligated to use separate facilities. Though NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia did hire women and African-Americans, offices, restrooms and other areas were kept

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