Free Gender Interview Movie Review: Top-Quality Sample To Follow

Gender trends and perception differ from one region to another and from generation to generation. The definition of roles and societal expectations for women has changed over time. A good way to determine this is to examine the lives of women in earlier generations, in comparison to modern women. I interviewed Angela Baker, a sixty-year-old woman from Odessa Texas and realized that the gender perceptions from previous generations are different from contemporary issues in many aspects.
Angela grew up in Mississippi, in a conservative African American family. They did not have much, and life took a struggle to get by. Women were the laborers in the home, and growing up in a matriarchal home, with her grandmother and her mother, who was a single mother. Her grandmother and mother tilled the land and kept chicken and farm animals to provide for the family.
Being African American was hard at that time. Angela states that they were surrounded by so much negativity and setbacks. Many children, especially girls were not getting any education. However, her grandmother had a whole different view of life and was determined to ensure that she got a proper education to help her future. Her grandfather was present in their life. However, he had this laid back approach and did not seem to have a voice in the family; neither did he seem eager to play a role in running the home.
As a little girl, Angela helped her grandmother run the home and tended the sheep, goats, and chicken on the farm. Her mother, on the other hand, moved to town to get menial jobs. She ended up meeting and marrying another man, who did not want to relate to Angela, for this reason, she continued living with her grandmother. Her biggest supporter was the grandmother. It was hard to come by a role model in those days and in most cases, each had to chart their path.
Angela went to then Cleveland Colored Consolidated School, which was, back then, an all black school. After the abolition of segregation, and her church having sponsored her schooling and her mother insisted on her joining Bayou Academy, which was an all-white school. Life was difficult being the only black in a white school. This experience, she says, made her strong and shaped who she is today. Girls were encouraged to take humanities and arts like language and home economics. She loved sciences and took mathematics and physical sciences. Black girls were not encouraged to take anything at all, it was a near miracle at that time, for one to proceed to college. She especially disliked the classes that taught practical skills like mechanics, tailoring, and home economics. To her, they represented what women and black people were doomed to do. Unlike many then, Angela went to university and majored in Mathematics.
It was hard for Angela to be accepted among her peers as an educated African American female. She says many were intimidated by her, and many tried to define her based on the views that they held about blacks at the time. She started teaching at her former school as a math teacher and later got a scholarship to further her studies. She became a university professor and served as the first African-American to head a faculty in an Ivy League University.
Working in institutions of higher learning made it easier for her to be accepted in her workplace probably due to the high caliber of intellectuals. However, it did not help in relationships where her first marriage failed because she appeared aggressive and uncompromising. Due to her upbringing and having had to fight her way through, she found it hard to fit into the expected roles of a wife at that time, a factor which made her two marriages unsuccessful. Angela does not have children of her own, a fact which has been frowned upon but she sees no gap in her life and strives to take care of other kids.
In general, Angela says that being a woman in that period came with a lot of challenges and responsibilities. Being a black woman at that time was near doom. However, these two factors are what motivated her to break away from the norm and conquer challenges to become who she is.