June Jordan Many Rivers To Cross Summary

Difficulties a woman endures all her life do not determine or undermine her strength, her ability of not letting these difficulties control who she becomes rather does. In her essay “Many Rivers to Cross”, author June Jordan reports how overcoming her mother’s suicide and men’s oppression and control over her early life carved and shaped her strong character thereafter. Brilliantly using tone alternations in combination with pathos, she highlights the issue that women need to limit society’s double standardism.
The author in her essay presents the underlying issue that addresses the important gap between men and women. She shows her suffering from her childhood and beyond her mother’s death. For instance, Jordan briefly refers to her father treating her mother inferiorly then thoroughly focuses on the

First of all, she starts-off with a sarcastic voice emphasizing again on women’s weakness and the unfairness that attains them and criticizing the believed superiority of men over women and children. In fact, she compares men to paying machines that lack responsibilities other than financing their family. The sarcastic anecdote “what a father owes to his child is not serious compared to what a man owes to the bank for a car, or a vacation” (p. 180) supports her claim.
She then follows with a new tone, anger, turning the narrative style of the events to a direct judgment addressed to her father and accusing him of her mother’s suicide. Nevertheless, she intends to target not only her father but all men into proving that their oppression causes women’s depression. Also, her anger appears when she uses the phrase “sit down and smoke a cigarette” to relieve her pain and surrender to the bitter (p.183). also confesses getting “utterly disgusted and disoriented” (p.184) by her father beating her up in front of the ladies attending her mother’s