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Their Eyes Were Watching God Synthesis Essay

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Within the past hundred years there has been a flood of female authors voicing their opinions on controversial topics regarding female oppression. There is no question that history has not treated women nor Africans very well, leading to the unfortunate double oppression faced, in particular, by black females. The movement began shortly after the Harlem Renaissance when Zora Neale Hurston published her noteworthy novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937. This novel paved in giving black women the tools to liberate themselves in their search for femininity and sexual identity, all while being subjected to racism and domesticity. The novel created such an influence that it inspired Alice Walker to write The Color Purple many years later, …show more content…

The renaissance was meant to be a liberating response to the restrictive standards of the Racial Uplift program, encouraging writers and artists to expose racist oppression in American society. Due to legislation like the Jim Crow laws, enforced in 1890 to 1910, many African Americans were disenfranchised. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens, leading to a decline in African-American political representation. As well as, tenant farming and sharecropping systems essentially caused the re-enslavement of African Americans in the South, where Hurston's novel is based. Harold D. Woodman, an Agricultural Historian at Purdue University writes in his book, Post-Civil War Southern Agriculture, “Although the war brought some social reshuffling as a few gained and others lost fortunes, the distribution of landed wealth in the South remained unchanged at the war’s end [...] the labor force remained, but the social organization that mobilized that labor force disappeared” (Woodman 319). As stated before, while emancipation was a step in the right direction, African Americans lacked the resources to pursue other career paths with their newfound freedom, causing them to fall into the same cycle. As Woodman exposes whites still held most the wealth and the land in the Southern states, leaving the Africans clueless in their next step. Due to this unfortunate circumstance, the

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