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

circumstances of her suicide. She became “more and more bedridden and demoralized” (p. 180), she explains, committing suicide and washing away long years of pain and abuse. She shows that the weakness of women gives men the power and creates the gap to support her denunciation of double standardism. One aspect of that gap obliged her to face a reality she couldn’t avoid, thus reflecting her weakness and inability to get back on her feet. Jordan never mentions getting in the way of her husband’s studies or new marriage. She then gains extreme disbelief and describes herself unable to continue living her life and raising her child alone (p.179). The disorientation she describes herself going through sheds the light on the structure of societies that consider women worthless and useless without a man around them. She also exposes a story that happened after her mother’s death for the oppression of the weak and the support of the strong. She explains her father not wanting to give her the insurance money her mother bequeathed her before her death. She intends to highlight her father’s oppression and control over her by mentioning him grabbing her by the arm before hitting her on the head and starting to bleed. She narrates trying to fight back but the ladies attending the funeral decided to stop the fight, judging it inappropriate (pp.181-182). Moreover, in order to appeal the most to her readers, the author uses a tone patterns that highly reflect her the topic she covers.
Jordan employs professional tone alternations that show a logical ascending evolution of the events she reports.

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

funeral.
She finally ends with a confident tone to convey the moral of her essay and transmit a message of hope and strength to women in general. She encourages them not to “die trying to stand-up”, but “live that way: standing up” (p.185). She motivates them to unite for the well-being and independence of every woman in need for help. She also wants her life an example every reader can take lessons from, which would eventually lead her to a personal triumph over an extremely unfair patriarchal society. She assumes women reading her essay will definitely look forward not to living a life similar to the hers. The author also sounds confident at the end of her essay as she regrets acting weak, oppressed and opinion-less (p.184). Furthermore, she teaches every desperate person that change can always happen no matter how little a person’s faith in progress seems (p.185). Moreover, Jordan ornaments her issue and tone with all three rhetorical appeals to captivate, touch and control the minds and emotions of her readers.
However, she mostly concentrates on pathos to impact her audience with her own emotions and influence the general conclusion they’ll acquire after getting exposed to her essay. She mainly focuses on the character of her father whom she expresses disgust to. She conveys an immoral image of him whom she considers unfair and sees as a dictator. For instance, she addresses antipathy in portraying him as a clueless man disoriented by his wife’s death and unable to identify her as dead or alive (p.181), thus sarcastically forcing the audience to react similarly. Jordan also clearly points her anger towards men who excluded choice from her life (p.179). Nevertheless, she mainly points her anger towards her father whom she clearly hates for indirectly pushing her mother to suicide. In fact, when he refused to give away the insurance money, she mentions getting upset for him beating her then and her getting obliged not to defend herself (pp. 183 – 184). She leads the readers to think of the father and men in general as potential violent and cruel people that really exist in obscure aspects of the society.
In the end, the ability of a woman to control how the difficulties in her life affect her personality determines her strength. Nowadays, the world witnesses a majority of retroactive-minded societies that treat women as inferior creatures, made to serve and obey men. Feminists criticize these patriarchal societies and also work hard towards reaching a common goal: achieving equality between men and women but also helping women strengthen to end their feeling of inferiority.