Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis & Maya Angelou

Jacqueline Bouvier was born in Southampton, NY, on July 28, 1929, three months before the stock market crash that wiped out many personal fortunes among the families of her peers. Although the crash affected her father=s investments, the Bouvier family as a whole took the financial downturn in stride, and Jacqueline enjoyed a life of ease growing up on the family estate, Lasta.

The Bouviers were officially members of Society and had been since publication of the first edition of the Social Register in 1887. Jacqueline=s biographer, her first cousin, John H. Davis, defines the four essential requirements: membership in a gentile family of European origins, which had possessed wealth for at least three or four generations, had sent sons to Ivy League colleges, and had

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ish Catholic immigrants whose patriarch had become rich. Her marriage to John F. Kennedy eventually provided her with the opportunity as First Lady to share her sense of style and impeccable upbringing with the American public, and her later marriage to Aristotle Onassis assured her of the continued wealth to afford to exercise that taste throughout her life. Although Jacqueline achieved some career and personal success on her own, most of her fame and prominence came as a result of being the wife of two quite different wealthy, powerful men. As a daughter of privilege, she was simply following the example expected of someone of her class, her family, her cultural background, and her gender. She set new standards for the role of First Lady, but those standards had everything to do with who she had been raised to be. She provides a magnificent example of a wealthy, high-born, white woman in mid-twentieth century American society. Maya Angelou offers a dramatic contrast. Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, MO, she grew up in segregated Arkansas at a time when being black meant being a second-class citizen with few rights and being female meant being subservient to men of all color. Yet Maya=s mother Vivian
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Approximate Word count = 1352
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)