What's Killing Poor White Women Analysis

Dorment convinces the audience with statistics and his own personal stories for example, he says, ’60 percent of the bachelors degrees in this country go to women.’ (Dorment 698) He is not saying that women are smarter but in today’s world we usually think of doctors as men and nurses as women. Dorment also says, “unmarried childless women under thirty earn 8 percent more than males.’ (Dorment 698) I believe that this is true women are believed to be weaker ones and tend to rely on men and that there are more jobs out there for men. Women are just supposed to stay at home and do the cleaning and take care of the kids. Society is forcing this on little girls growing up and it needs to stop. Dorment says, ‘institutional sexism and pay discrimination are still ugly realities.’ Why? Why do women make less, why are they forced to be stay at home housekeepers? Society we need to get a grip on making men and women equal instead of putting gender roles on everything, or we will destroy the upcoming generations.

Kelley commences her speech by providing a shocking statistic that “two million children under the age of sixteen years” strenuously work to support themselves and their families in order to create a forceful sense of emotion within her audience. By doing this she illuminates the rate of child labor to stress the severity of the problem. The author repeats “increase” to emphasize and describe that the American workforce is increasingly composed of girls/women in order to highlight their role and the growth of their participation in the workforce. Juxtaposing how girls spend their time with how

What does this say about Hispanics? What kind of destiny do we face in the future? Clearly we aren’t going towards a very bright one. Why would these girls want this kind of future for themselves? Where they go off at a young age, with no education, get pregnant, and become a housewife for the rest of their lives.

One major issue that the other Wes Moore’s mother experiences is not being able to get an education due to a lack of funding. Mary had become pregnant at the age of 16 and was unable to continue her education. While she was just barely providing for her family through side jobs the paid minimum wage, she was also trying to receive an education by attending John Hopkins University. She was able to do this through a program of Pell Grants. She was only able to get 16 credits done when government decided to quit funding the Pell Grants. Mary, along with many others trying to receive a college education, was unable to finish her education. Due to the cut in funding Mary could no longer afford it. Without being able to receive a college education, Mary would continue to live in poverty because without an education she would not be able to get a good job.

Women in the work force are not nearly as dominant as men are. Katha argues that this isn’t due to women not being able to handle the workload, but instead because of how society, especially in the business world, best adheres to a man. Katha uses an excellent example on page 402 that shows how inequality in the business world is prevalent. Katha uses the Sears case in which Men were getting the bigger and better business deals, simply because women could not handle the pressure of dealing with the amount of work and emotional fatigue this would have brought. Finally she analyzes that women aren’t actually emotionally weak. It is society that has labeled them this way, which causes people to view and categorize women as emotionally weak. Pollitt wants the general public to know that women are perfectly happy by being themselves, and not having to conform to society's expectations. Katha says that this is because society has labeled women as not wanting a job that has a lot of emotional ties in it.

Beginning her speech, Kelley applies her credibility by placing statistics regarding the controversy of child labor laws, revealing that she is informed about this topic. Her credibility has a great connection to her purpose, she claims that the number of working girls doubled from census to census and girls from twelve to twenty years are working when they should not have to. Kelley then manifests her concern over these working girls by explaining that, “tonight,” while everybody else is snoozing away in bed, “these several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills,”(16-17). These words make her audience feel pity concerning those young girls and are a great reason to act against the unfair laws and regulations that violate both their human and women's rights, especially when they aren’t even getting paid fairly. By appealing to their emotion Florence Kelley wishes to push the women to act on her proposal of joining together and helping the poor young girls of their nation. Kelley continues to approach and influence the women’s sentiments and- hopefully- their actions by including her scandalized argument that in “Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night,” (29-31). She decides to include the ‘bobbins’ of sewing machines in factories to illustrate how short and how young they are to be working in dangerous factories where their rights are ignored, girls at that age should worry more about going to school instead of sacrificing themselves to bring money for bread to their homes. One would understand that many families are living through poverty due to the economy being at a very depressing state and they need the most they can do to increase their financial position to survive in their society, then again, girls should be

The speaker begins her speech with introducing the topic of child labor by stating powerful facts that support her case and using poignant diction to create sympathy; these devices work together to bring attention to the problem of children being overworked from very young ages, and attempt to win the audiences allegiance to her cause. Kelley refers to a census regarding the different groups of people making up the “wage earning class,” and saying that “no contingent so doubles from census period to census period…as does the contingent of girls between twelve and twenty years of age.” The rate of young girls working, earning a living, increases faster than any other group of people. The reference to a census, tells the audience that, not only has the speaker done research on her topic using credible sources, it indicates she is serious about it. Utilizing the census’ data, the speaker does well. In addition to using fact, the speaker also uses diction to reveal that she would like to make a

In her article, author Leslie Mann uses a study conducted by Paula England, a professor of sociology at New York University. In England’ study, she followed educated and uneducated women that were born between 1958 to 1964. The study included black, Hispanic, and Asian women, but most of the women studied were white women. These women were interviewed and asked questions based on their education history, career, relationships, and marriages. In her article, Mann included an interview with a woman named Vicki Rautiokoski, as well as statements from England and another professor named Barbara Risman. Because England and Riseman were both professors of sociology and Rautiokoski had the experience of an educated married woman, Mann used their knowledge in her article to support her analysis.

In Tressie McMillan’s “The Logic of Stupid Poor People”, it changed people’s views on the threat of keeping up with society, and the status symbol people think they must maintain. Society classifies it as Middle class, suburbs, or simply rich and poor. People feel threatened when someone looks better than them, or has something that they do not have. This story killed all reasons to even feel this way. McMillan also linked this story back to her own personal childhood. Their family was a classic black American migration family, with rural Southern roots. During this time most African Americans were considered as poor. Her family

The introductory sentence of Anna Hulbert’s article, “Boy Problems”, led to my reminiscence of my childhood days as a girl scout. My time spent as a girl scout was filled with cookie sales and father-daughter dances, not adults persuading me to pursue a career in either science, technology, or math. The “Girls Go Tech” campaigns warn that “by sixth grade, an alarming number of girls lose interest in math, science, and technology. Which means they won't qualify for most future jobs." However, this idea falls under the booby trap of a small sample. Concluding that young woman will not be qualified for a job based on a statistics that only represents the woman's primary schooling is absurd.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, the author of “The Logic of Stupid Poor People” writes about her life experiences and the inequality that she was able to overcome because of the example of her mother and how she was able to obtain access to opportunities that would otherwise be not available to her. Her argument in her article is that how an individual will dress and act makes a difference in what opportunities he or she will be offered. Although everyone would agree that they would hire the best looking person for a job to represent their company, she only declares about the black community. The author of this article, Ms.Cottom has many fatal errors that make her argument invalid and occasionally contradicting herself. In theory, this article was supposed to explain that poor people buy luxury items to fit in, but on the contrary, next she states that this still may not work if the individual happens to be black. In reality, this article is not about being poor; this article is about being discriminated for being black.

As a minority gets older they realize the hard truths of society. These truths involve many different types of stereotypes that contribute to racism and overall surround the idea of inequality and framing in social economics. In Diana Kendall’s piece “Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption” social inequality is viewed as a heavy topic, that the media abuses. In fact, Kendall uses the Census Bureau to point out that “the net worth of the average white household in 2000 was more than ten times that of the average African American household and more than eight times the average Latino/Latina household” (338). Based on the facts from this source minorities are financially at a disadvantage and are presumed to be unhappy due to lack of wealth. However, money does not control or even affect happiness rather Kendall makes a point that framing does, which can be seen through James McBride life story “The Boy in the Mirror”, where the world McBride’s mother framed for him, one without inequality, begins to crumble . McBride paints a picture of the dramatic change that happened when arriving at adulthood when he writes, “We did not consider ourselves poor or deprived, or depressed, for the rules of the outside world seemed meaningless to us as children. But as we grew up and fanned out into the world as teenagers and college students we brought the outside home with us, and the world that Mommy had so painstakingly created began to fall apart” (415). The simple

“Desperation of the times . . . that’s what kills them” (Potts 609). Desperation, defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary means, “strong feeling of sadness, fear, and loss of hope” (“Desperation” def.). In What’s Killing Poor White Women?, readers learn about the life and death of Crystal Wilson, a poor white woman from Arkansas. Crystal had many factors that exhibited the feelings associated with desperation, lack of education, living in poverty, and living in a desolate location.

For centuries and even today, gender inequality and racial prejudice continue to exist. Throughout time these concepts have overlapped and intertwined, each other creating complex interactions and a negative influence upon society. In the 1980s, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw through her article, named Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, introduced the term “Intersectionality.” Intersectionality, is the theory of how different types of discriminations interact thus, goes hand in hand with Judith Butler, in her article titled “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” which expresses the term “gender acts” and helps decipher a probable cause of the many discriminations faced in contemporary society. Since both gender inequality and racial inequality share a common thread, I believe that what intersectionality represents will help understand Judith Butler’s view on gender classification and the dynamic it’s caused on our social and political formation.

Currently, according to statistics from the Department of Labor of the United States; of the “123 million women age 16 years and over, 58.6 percent or 72 million were labor force participants and in the long run, women are projected to account for 51 percent of the increase in total labor force growth between 2008 and 2018” (U.S. Department of Labor). These numbers will clearly demonstrate to any skeptic that women are leaving behind their old dependence on men and becoming more autonomous and self-determined to succeed; it sounds great, doesn’t it? On the other hand; however, men are losing as women are gaining. The Department of Labor has reported that men have lost about 4.75 million jobs during the current economic recession that started in 2007, while women have only lost 1.66 million. Additionally, “the only parts of the economy still growing—health care, education and government—have traditionally hired mostly women”( Cauchon). Now, as a result, of the statistics that show that females are overcoming males in the workplace; the gender segregation has created some kind of imaginary “glass ceiling” that impedes both sexes from advancing professionally and economically.