Only Daughter Sandra Cisneros Analysis

Sandra Cisneros offers up a slice of her life as an only Mexican-American daughter in a family of seven male members, in the short essay “Only Daughter”, published 1995 by

Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. She walks us through the relationships she had with her father and brothers and how their efforts to diminish her gender only propelled her to push deeper and harder to realize her goal of education and independence. The process by which she became the woman she is now is traced not so much through events, but rather through experiences and necessary adaptation. She relates the world to us via the impact of a pro-patriarchal family.

Through it all, Cisneros demonstrates the hardest struggle of all: self-acceptance and the approval of others, within the

His request for additional copies of her story is captioned as “most wonderful”, the gender polarization erased for the first time, by his acceptance and her steadfast faithfulness to her identity. It is both a relief and a victory for her, the only daughter.

“Only Daughter” took us behind the face of social norms and expectations, to reveal the real struggles occurring in a gender-polarized world, in the most personal and vulnerable of places: the family. Sandra Cisneros opens up to the reader, revealing the secrets and processes that forged her into the literary scholar she is now and the woman that drives it all. Her need to have her father’s approval and her brother’s rejection based on gender alone only added emphasis to gender politics and the necessity to realize her dreams of education and independence. She overcame exclusion, rejection and discrimination in her own family, to acquire prestige and recognition with publishers and universities—the small aside of professional and financial accomplishments in the essay. Most of all, she came to accept herself and erase the pervasive gender polarization in her family to finally receive acceptance from her