Gender Stereotypes In Down In The Delta By Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born in Missouri on April 4th, 1928. She was a poet, singer, memoirist and civil rights activist and has won an accolade of prestigious awards. Despite having a myriad of professions and only beginning her career as an autobiographer at the age of 41, she is perhaps best known for her autobiographies. On top of this, she was nominated for the Pulitzer prize in 1972 with her book of poetry “Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie,” (Moyer, Homer E., 2003). In the same year, Angelou became the first black woman to have her original script produced with her screenplay “Georgia, Georgia” (Brown, A.,1997) She is also credited with being the first African-American woman to direct a major motion picture, “Down in the Delta”,

Tanja Schweizer argues in “The Psychology of Novelty-Seeking, Creativity, and Innovation” (2006) that creatives tend to be open-minded, non-conformists, and psychologically androgynous i.e.transcend gender stereotypes. This is certainly applicable to Maya Angelou, who challenged the idea of women as sexual objects in her poems. She writes about how valuable women are, despite how they are portrayed in mainstream media. She also used the autobiography format to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society, specifically women of colour. Angelou broke gender stereotypes of African-American women by describing the images and stereotypes she had experienced in her own life and then disproving them. (Manora, Yolanda M., 2005). She challenged the social norms that were expected of her time, refusing to conform to the idea of women just being sexual objects, expressing the psychologically androgynous trait mentioned

Her work was influential as it was a way to express that the sexual abuse that she had endured as a black woman was a topic worth discussing. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was pivotal in transforming a previously taboo subject into something acceptable and worthy of discourse. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was, in fact, banned in many schools after it’s release because Maya Angelou’s honesty about having been sexually abused opened a subject matter that had long been deemed unmentionable.

“Here the black woman takes off the cuffs. Here’s a black woman who writes her story. It was a very important literary feat because it said it was okay for a black woman to say what happened to her in public in a literary form.” - Eugene Redmond, in Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise (2016)

“I’d never heard of another black woman, young girl, who had been raped. So I read those words and thought, somebody knows who I am” - Oprah Winfrey in Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise