Feminism In 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'

Feminism has created many opportunities for women, and it has expanded the rights for women in today’s society. However, women in the early 1900s were not as treated with respect and did not have as many rights as the women in our time period do. Women were looked at as a pretty object that men owned and someone to do the cooking, cleaning, and having the children. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the portrayal of women shows the said stereotypical woman from the early 1900s. This novel shows the struggles of a young, beautiful, black woman, Janie, that is trying to fit into the world and find the love that she has always desired. Janie goes through beatings, a forced marriage, and being controlled by a dominant man before she finds that

Janie is beaten by her grandmother when she is caught kissing a boy. The grandmother realizes that Janie needs to be married off to calm her wild spirit. Janie doesn’t want to be forced into this marriage, but her grandmother beats her into submission and guilts her into marrying Logan Killicks. This shows that Nanny, the grandmother, cannot accept Janie’s wild spirit and the freedom she desperately wants. In How To Read Literature Like A Professor, Foster explains how a person does not necessarily have to be a bloodsucking monster to be a literary vampire. Nanny, when she beats and marries off Janie, takes Janie’s innocence and youth because she follows her own corrupt views of life. She is also beaten by Joe when she is older and works in their store. Whenever she does something wrong, Joe beats her until she does it correctly or so she won’t do it again. In the 1900s, it was a lot more common for the husband to beat the wife. Joe has obviously beaten Janie multiple times, because she knows that it is not worth fighting back. During her marriage to Joe, Janie points out, “The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For awhile she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing” (Hurston 76). Joe has taken her freedom in order to keep her loyal and compliant. This shows that men believed that they should be dominant

They tend to believe that women are their property and that they own them. Janie has been in three marriages and all three of her husbands believed her to be their property. She is a beautiful woman that is constantly objectified by both men and women. Even though Tea Cake treats her better than Joe and Logan, he is still guilty of treating her like an object and being possessive. When Tea Cake slapped Janie, it was because he wanted everyone to know that she was his and no one else’s. “Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved him that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession” (Hurston 147). Even though Janie didn’t do anything wrong, Tea Cake wanted to relieve himself of the worrying of his possession over Janie. Joe wanted Janie to wear head-rags while she was in the store because he was jealous of all the attention she was getting. “She was in the store for him to look at, not those others” (Hurston 55). He wanted her to be there so he could look at her, not everyone else. Earlier in the novel, Logan Killicks expressed interest in Janie because she was pretty and young. Women were not as respected as men were in Janie’s time. Women were thought to be prizes to be won or objects to be