Martha Euphema's Life In Society

Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was born and raised in Washington D.C. Unfortunately, since Euphema was African-American and female, she faced many setbacks and problems through her life like racism, and sexism. Being born during this time period and in Washington D.C, Euphemia was inspired and motivated to follow the career she wanted and to get an education. Despite being discriminated against, Euphemia was encouraged to stand out in the world as an intelligent, wise, and strong woman. Although the United States was not the best at acceptance during her time period, Euphemia was assisted by her family members and friends to keep moving forward.
Euphemia hardly used her first name “Martha”. She was born into a loving and caring family on September …show more content…
During this time period, women were expected to stay home and clean, cook, and take care of the children if they had any. During the early nineteen hundreds, most families stuck to traditional gender roles. Meaning that the men would do the more "laborious" work and women would do the things that i mentioned before. During this time period we also see an increase of female students studying in colleges and universities. Women were also expected to drop out of school when they gave birth to their first child. Most of them would have to be single in order to pursue the career and education they wanted. If women during this time period wanted to get married to a male, she would basically have to hand over everything she owned to the male and would basically become his property. Many women got around this dilemma by living with another female. Although they were still women, society at the time did not think of women getting married as being a thing, therefore none of these rules applied to them when they got married or lived together. Later on, many more women started working in the workforce, adding more income to their households. They were typically given lower status jobs that men would not normally get. These women faced many more problems like lower wages than males for the same job, under representation as workers, and having to multitask with their many problems …show more content…
Although society in the twenty first century is more accepting than the twentieth century, Euphemia would still face racism and sexism due to institutionalized racism and misogynistic views in society.This society and time period would have helped her because our society today is more accepting of gender, sexuality, race, religion, etc. It might have hindered her because we still see signs of racial and gender prejudice. Meaning we still see many of the problems Euphemia faced growing up in our own society