Zora Neale Hurston Women

It is readily apparent that Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God works as a vanguard text in the pronunciation of equal rights for both women and African Americans. The manner in which this text presents these ideas is well documents. What has been less discussed in the manner in which Hurston presents this idea by means of replicating historical trauma and reorientation of personhood, thereby displacing women, not only as the new slave but as subhuman in order to call upon the radical concept of African American woman being equal to white men in the early twentieth century. Published fifteen years before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hurston’s text challenges the ideals of American culture less than twenty years after the Nineteenth …show more content…
As Barbara Deckard discusses in The Women’s Movement, “All during the 1930s, employers, unions, and government made a sexist plea that women should go back to the great reserve army of unemployment to solve the men’s employment problems” (295). As John Garraty notes, these desires to push women out of the workforce was not limited to the United States. Garraty states, “the depression had many bad effects upon women. Massive efforts were made to get married women, especially those whose husbands were employed, out of the workforce. Even before 1929, many countries had passed laws restricting the employment of women” (116). In the United States, “A 1932 American antinepotism law for government workers did not stipulate which spouse must be discharged, but three out of every four who were let go under the law were female” (Garraty 116). A woman’s place, it was widely felt, was to remain in the home and depend on her husband. It should be noted, however, that these ideas were intended for white woman. The double oppression that African American women faced during this time made life, much less the idea of employment, far more …show more content…
In the very beginning of the novel, we see reference of The Middle Passage to orient the reader in the lineage of historic trauma. The first words of the novel read, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turn his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men” (Hurston 1). Presented here, as the last sentence states, is the life of men. For the first group, the white slave owners, the ships carry wishes that are brought in with the tide. The dream of freedom, equality, and financial well-being, in essence, the American Dream, is the dream being discussed. What is being brought ashore are the slaves that will help make that American Dream a reality in the form of free laborers. For others, whose dreams fail to arrive “until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation” and whose dreams are “mocked to death by Time” (Hurston 1), these are the dreams, not only of the slaves, but the freed African Americans. The Watcher, not a deity, as indicative by the lowercase “his,” is reference to racist, white superstructure inherent within the United States with The Watcher calling on the idea of an overseer. The Watcher delayed the American Dream for