Blog Number One: Zora Neale Hurston

I found Zora Neale Hurston's writing to be pretty similar to Alice Walkers in that they both are not only represting women, struggles they faced in writing and being a women in general, but about being a woman of color. What really stuck out to me in Zora Neale Hurston's "I Get Born" was her not even getting acceptance or support from her father. She wrote in her essay:

 "It seems that one daughter was all that he figured he could stand.

My sister, Sarah, was his favorite child, but that one girl was enough.

 Plenty more sons, but no more girl babies to wear out shoes and bring in nothing.

 I don't think he ever got over the trick he felt that I played on him by getting born a girl"

 

It amazes me to hear talk like that, a father dissapointed in having a daughter because essentially they are a waste of money. To know that your father feels like you being born a girl is some kind of cruel joke is dissapointing in itself, but then to know that had you been born a male, he would have been satisfied and would have found you worth something and useful. Alot of the writers we have read about thus far have been put down by men in general, but mostly (so what I've interpreted from our previous readings) men wanted to keep women down, on a level where they are controlled and cannot do much on their own or think too much for themselves. Not only did Hurston have to deal with all of that, she had to deal with that but on top of that her dad wished she had never been born at all because she was a female, and was not in her life.