Women in Traditional Cultures in Novels

In Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, the author sets out to change the perception of the white community that the Indian was somehow less deserving, less capable, and less worthy because of some racial difference. Even as she tries to debunk certain racial stereotypes, though, Jackson ends up creating new ones. Ramona is an orphan. Her father was white and her mother an Indian, and she was raised by a Mexican woman who does not tell her about her parents. She falls in love with a shepherd named Alessandro, a native American. The foster mother hates Indians and so tries to keep the two apart, but they elope and go to live with Alessandro's people. What follows is a depiction of how difficult life is for Mexicans and Native Americans in California at the time. The couple are unable to get medical help, so their child dies. They have to move when white farmers want their land. Alessandro is murdered by

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e comes to Big Joe Portagee shows this as he wrestles with Tia Ignacia and suddenly falls in love. From the men's point of view, women are still snares into which they may fall and form which they seek to extricate themselves whenever possible, and so this is a society where maleness if celebrated while femaleness is revered and feared at the same time. Women are sought for parties, but they are shunned when they seem to be bent on changing men's lives. This is indeed the role that women seem to represent in most of these works--they are life-changing for men, domesticating them and so perpetuating society. Women in The Zoot-Suit Murders are more varied in the way they are presented. This is a novel set in the 1940s but written with a more contemporary sensibility about equality and the frustrations felt by women because they are relegated to traditional social roles, essentially as either angels or whores. The truth is more complex than that, but the cult of machismo seems to infuse the Mexican-American community and the American army both. Women are one of the things the two groups fight over either to protect their supposed and highly valued honor or to seduce them away from someone else. The women themselves are ambiv
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Approximate Word count = 1545
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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