Summarizing and Synthesizing Activity

This is an ongoing occurrence in ​brown girl dreaming​, Woodson describes moments

where her female family had to be the “unheard sex”. In specific her grandmother who had to

struggle the most as an African-American woman in the south. Johanna M. Smith explains how

different women, had different goals and dreams due to other factors. Smith states,​ ​“Feminist

stress that, while all women are female, they are something else as well (such as African

American, lesbian, Muslim, Pakistani). This ‘something else’ is precisely what makes them, their

problems, and their goals different from those other women” (Smith 345). An ongoing job taken

by Woodson’s grandmother, portrays the struggle of women greatly but specifically a black

woman’s struggle in the south. The grandmother doesn’t only have this inferiority to men and

white people but to white women as well. When informing her grandchildren on how they

shouldn't take part in doing daywork for the white people that live across in Greenville, she

evidently states, “​Don’t any of you ever do daywork​, she warns us. ​I’m doing it now so you don’t

have to”​ (Woodson 55-56). The grandmother knows that as things are now; where black people

are seen as lesser than whites, she wants her grandchildren including Jacquline Woodosn to

know that she is doing this for her and her siblings to reach higher or greater things in the future

than this life she has to deal with.

Works Cited:

Smith, Johanna M. ​Frankenstein: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical,

and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical

Perspectives​. Bedford/St. Martins, 2016.

Woodson, Jacqueline. ​brown girl dreaming​. Penguin Group, 2014.