Male-Female Relationships in the Black Community
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In spite of the gains made by the women's movement toward gender equality in American life, true equality has not been achieved in many areas, including the economic sphere. Surveys show that women on average earn significantly less than male workers, and indeed more than this, that women are paid significantly less than men for the same work. The overall figure usually given is that women earn sixty cents for every dollar paid to a male worker. Women come up shot in other areas as well--they are employed at a lower rate than their proportion of the population, are less likely to advance, and more and more are the heads of households at or below the poverty level. Black women show an even wider disparity than white women in all these areas, and in the black community there are many single mothers as heads of households who have a particular difficulty finding a job and supporting their families. One of the reasons for this situation is the problem of black male-female relationships. Research shows the nature of this relationship, and black literature also reflects the difficult course of male-female relationships in the black community. Rodgers-Rose (1980) notes the dimensions of the problem as she writes, One of the most complex and pressing issues in the struggle for Black survival is centered in and grows out of the relationship between Black men and women. This relationship, in the final analysis, determines how they support each other as men and woman and how
. . .
e it extraordinarily difficult for us as Black women and Black men to see each other clearly or speak to each other honestly (Grant, 1995, 3-4).
Rodgers-Rose tries to discern what it is that black men and women really want in a relationship and uses a survey to delineate a number of things they state that they want. She finds that most studies concentrate on the outward status characteristics of income, education, occupation, and sexual compatibility:
They have studied the first three properties of intimate relationships--conversation, monetary exchange, and sex--but they have paid little attention to the fourth property of the qualities wanted in a relationship. . . Even the quality of sexual compatibility does not rank as high as the qualities of honesty, understanding, independence, and proper manners (Rodgers-Rose, 1980, 260).
In the short story "The Johnson Girls," Bambara (1992) presents a portrait of a group of black women and their attitudes toward men. It is possible to see in this story evidence of the way black men and women assimilate and incorporate stereotypes about themselves into their real behavior. The character of Thumb is presented as a man who has accepted that he is to be shiftless and so is shiftles
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1554
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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