On June 17th, 1968, my mother was born during a very despairing time for the black community. Not only were African-Americans still struggling with severe racism 100 years after the end of slavery but the leader of their movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated less than three months before her birth. In its 23rd year of publication, Ebony magazine was trying its best to report on the positive things happening around the black community in America but despite this attempt at optimism, there was an obvious rift within the community itself. While the entire black race was fighting for equality, the oppressions black women faced and the accomplishments they made despite those disadvantages were often trivialized, misunderstood and
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The majority of these ads focus on improving one’s physical appearance, especially in regards to hair and skin. Just by flipping through the February edition, the beauty standards for men and women were found to be very distinct. For instance, in this edition, ads for wigs and products that relax or straighten hair outnumber products for natural looking hair roughly two to one. Furthermore, in the former category of ads, only women were featured whereas in the latter category, only one ad pictured a woman while the rest showed men. This conveys that black women were held to a whiter standard of beauty than men in that the products targeted at women were designed to straighten their naturally kinky hair or even cover it completely. The products targeted at men were designed to enhance their natural hair or at most, control …show more content…
A product like this shows just how desperate women were for affordable and accessible birth control. This is especially true for women of color who were struggling to care for their family and needed to prevent it from growing beyond their means. However, poor black women and their male counterparts feared the new form of birth control, the pill which was explained in an article titled “Birth Control and the Negro Woman,” from the March edition of Ebony. Many women within the black community were fearful that this new birth control was invented by white supremacists with the intention of making them sterile in order to end the race. However, rather than sterilization and extinction, the more general fear was simply that birth control was being pushed on African-Americans to prevent them from growing in number. Black men were often opposed because they thought the pill would give women too much agency and consequently they could sleep around freely and not worry about getting pregnant, which is a freedom reserved for
The majority of these ads focus on improving one’s physical appearance, especially in regards to hair and skin. Just by flipping through the February edition, the beauty standards for men and women were found to be very distinct. For instance, in this edition, ads for wigs and products that relax or straighten hair outnumber products for natural looking hair roughly two to one. Furthermore, in the former category of ads, only women were featured whereas in the latter category, only one ad pictured a woman while the rest showed men. This conveys that black women were held to a whiter standard of beauty than men in that the products targeted at women were designed to straighten their naturally kinky hair or even cover it completely. The products targeted at men were designed to enhance their natural hair or at most, control …show more content…
A product like this shows just how desperate women were for affordable and accessible birth control. This is especially true for women of color who were struggling to care for their family and needed to prevent it from growing beyond their means. However, poor black women and their male counterparts feared the new form of birth control, the pill which was explained in an article titled “Birth Control and the Negro Woman,” from the March edition of Ebony. Many women within the black community were fearful that this new birth control was invented by white supremacists with the intention of making them sterile in order to end the race. However, rather than sterilization and extinction, the more general fear was simply that birth control was being pushed on African-Americans to prevent them from growing in number. Black men were often opposed because they thought the pill would give women too much agency and consequently they could sleep around freely and not worry about getting pregnant, which is a freedom reserved for