Class, gender, race, and ethnicity play important roles in the film “Real Women Have Curves” by Patricia Cardoso. Ana is the main character and is portrayed as a Hispanic/Latino teenager finishing her senior year of high school. Having grown up in a Roman Catholic house hold, her family expects her to stay home and take care of the family and eventually get married and start a family of her own soon. However, Ana has different plans for herself and does not want to follow traditions and beliefs that her mother tries to force against her. Ana wants to go to college and continue her education and start a life of her own. Her mother does not want her to go off to college because she wants her to stay home to work and take care of the family until …show more content…
she has one of her own. Her mother also wants her to “save” herself for marriage so a man will look at her more highly. “As part of a stratification system, gender ranks men above women of the same race and class. Women and men could be different but equal.” (Lorber). In their religion women are expected to be caretakers and are supposed to do all the housework, cooking, and raising the children. They are seen as the backbone of the family and they are not supposed to do anything else with their lives besides take care of their loved ones. Ana breaks the expectations of her family and believes there is more to being a woman than being a housewife and she is going to prove it. In terms of Ana’s class, she got into one of the best high schools in California and got into college in New York with a full scholarship, her family is part of the working class with her father being a landscaper and her sister, Estela, owning her own dress manufacturing shop.
Even though her sister’s dress factory is small and the few ladies who work there do not get paid much, all them work hard and respect Estela. Relating to Heidi Schmidt’s article “Small, Foreign, and Female” work conditions are similar for women like Ana. "There are just three things I look for in entry-level hiring," Hossfeld recalls the manager saying. "Small, foreign, and female. You just do that right and everything else takes care of itself." (Schmidt). Women are seen as push overs in the work place and men expect them to be submissive when it comes to being in the workplace. Ana refuses to be a weak worker when she gets a job at Estela’s factory for the summer and makes all the other working women realize that they are beautiful and worth more than what is under their …show more content…
clothes. Being a Hispanic/Latina Ana has tough beliefs and traditions to follow to make her family proud of her.
She struggles with finding beauty in her true self because of the negative attention she gets from her mother, and begins to break the barriers that are set for her. Ana begins to believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder whether her mother agrees with her or not. She is not allowed to date and her mother is convinced that she will never find a husband because she is “enormous.” Although, before she ends her senior year she meets a boy and starts to go out with him, she keeps this a secret from her mother but sooner or later she suspects Ana has done something sinful to her body and slaps her in the face during an argument. At the end of the film when Ana is leaving the house to go to college her mother would not even come out of her bedroom to give her, her blessing. Throughout all the hardship Ana endured her last year of high school to become happy she succeeds and lives her life the way she wants to, not how others want her
to. In conclusion, Ana expanded my understanding of race, gender, class, and ethnicity by always being herself and staying true to what she believed in. Regardless of what her mother or anyone else thought about her, she stuck by what she wanted to do and never took criticism from anyone. Being a woman in her age and position was proven to be difficult but she never cracked under pressure or let anyone get the best of her. With the support she had from her father, sister, and grandfather she knew how to conquer life and matured into the girl that she wanted to be.
The scene was acquired from the play Real Women Have Curves by Josefina Lopez. The characters are five Latina, overweight women by the names of Ana, Estela, Carmen, Pancha, and Rosali. Carmen is the mother of Ana and Estela, so the sewing factory these women work could be a family business, since the owner of the factory is Estela. Therefore, being a factory on stage for this scene probably in the past because from the scene, you can tell there is no air conditioning and they are sewing the material themselves. They also mention “La Migra” and how most of them had papers and some didn’t. In addition, the scene begins with Ana, undressing herself due to the unbearable heat. The women start picking on her because of her fat however Ana doesn’t seem to care because she loves her body and doesn’t need to be treated as a sexual object. The other women join the conversation and conclude undressing themselves comparing body parts to examine who has the worst overweight condition (which seems to be the conflict yet sets the mood to a comedic one). They end feeling
In “Scrubbing in Maine”by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich decides to work at the Maids Franchise so she can observe how the system was made for the maids. During her time being a maid she became emotionally impacted by the way her and the women were treated. Ehrenreich experiences in the article”Scrubbing in Maine,’’are the ones I can relate to even though both jobs don’t seem the same, the fact is my time spent working at Jewel is remarkably and depressingly similar to the time spent by Ehrenreich as a maid. In both instances employees are not really human, but are parts of a bigger machine and only Blue collar workers are stereotypes as uneducated unthinking individuals. As Blue collar jobs emphasized the routines, dehumanization of the employee, and loss of control over a person’s time. Workers do not engage in cognitive skills, but physical
While most movies of the 2000s somehow spoke about sex among young adults, for the first time the emphasis is on the virginity of a Mexican American female. In part this topic is not discussed openly, it is only discussed awkwardly in a mother to daughter conversation. This movie opens the eye to many families conservative other this matter, Ana’s mother openly shames her daughter to losing her virginity to a random person which was not the case. In this scene, rather than have a heartwarming conversation with her daughter she is angry possibly at her daughter but possibly at herself for not knowing what her daughter was doing. Ana is prepared to lose her virginity and is responsible to purchase contraceptives something also talked about but mostly whispered in the chicano community. Ana states that women get pregnant not because they are having sex but because they are having it unprotected or don’t know how to use different methods of contraceptive. The talk among Mexican American families is not how to use contraceptives rather it is do not get pregnant or “ELSE”. Real Women Have Curves shows that the real problem is not getting pregnant it is the lack of communication Mexican American women have with their
The men in the factories looked at the women coming in as just an extra pair of hands. They were mostly indifferent. Even so, the women could not date the men. This rule was more of a control effort and a bit of the women not being seeing as respectable women. Yet, the bosses were at a lost because they were not used to women working. The bosses tried to enforce rules; when they were broken, the bosses did not know how to punish the women because they were women. The women had to wear hats, even if their hair was longer than the men. The women did not like this because they felt as though they were being discriminated against. They would wear slacks and carry tools because the men had to, but the men did not wear head coverings. Also, everyone that worked in the factories, besides the factory women, viewed them as girls because a true woman would be at home taking care of the house. They had to trade in their smooth soft hands for rough hands filled with
It seems that every sibling doesn’t always have a great relationship with their older or younger siblings. In the movie “Real Women Have Curves”, we have two sisters, Anna and Estella,who seem not to get along in the beginning because of their differences, but at the end they become the best of friends because they have similar dreams and learn to support each other. The advantage of Anna and Estella’s relationship is that they benefit from each other. The whole story is that you don’t always realize how much you have in common with your siblings until you realize that you have similar dreams and can be there for each other.
The two works of literature nudging at the idea of women and their roles as domestic laborers were the works of Zora Neale Hurston in her short story “Sweat”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Whatever the setting may be, whether it is the 1920’s with a woman putting her blood, sweat and tears into her job to provide for herself and her husband, or the 1890’s where a new mother is forced to stay at home and not express herself to her full potential, women have been forced into these boxes of what is and is not acceptable to do as a woman working or living at home. “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” draw attention to suppressing a woman’s freedom to work along with suppressing a woman’s freedom to act upon her
She does this by drawing on the three points made earlier in the essay: stereotypes, discrimination, and gender pay. However, there is room for biased in this article. A lot of her factual information comes from a survey, and as we talked about in class surveys are not always reliable. They allow for error and in this case the values given could be higher or lower than what they actually are. Also, this article does not take into account of race, ethnicity, changing demographics, global economic restructuring or shifting of cultural patterns (Prokos
Young girls were not allowed to open the windows and had to breathe in the dust, deal with the nerve-racking noises of the machines all day, and were expected to continue work even if they 're suffering from a violent headache or toothache (Doc 2). The author of this report is in favor of employing young women since he claimed they seemed happy and they loved their machines so they polished them and tied ribbons on them, but he didn 't consider that they were implemented to make their awful situations more bearable. A woman who worked in both factory and field also stated she preferred working in the field rather than the factory because it was hard work but it never hurt her health (Doc 1), showing how dangerous it was to work in a factory with poor living conditions. Poor living conditions were common for nearly all workers, and similar to what the journalist saw, may have been overlooked due to everyone seeming
While it can be seen as if Ana is being rude to her Mother, Ana is trying to bring herself out of the traditional ways her mother believes in. Ana wants her mother to see that women are not worth by their “virginity”, or their looks. As Ana’s sister Estela
In the film Real Women Have Curves, Ana’s mother Carmen plays an interesting role as that of an unrepentant mother. She hugs the line between being supportive of Ana and wanting what’s best for her while also struggling with letting her go. Due to her inability to compromise, ultimately there is a rift left between the two women, whether Carmen realized that this would happen or not.
Being a curvaceous young woman is hard enough. Especially when you’re trying to find love, you’re seeking approval and anticipating a better future for yourself. The film Real Women Have Curves stresses how important higher education is to a Mexican-American teenager and the wrath she endures from her mother because of her weight and aspiration. Mark Twain stated that, “Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great” (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/keepaway_from_those_who_try_to_belittleyour/215215.html). I believe I can personally relate to Real Women Have Curves, the reason being is because I’m a daughter, I’m overweight, and I’m seeking a post-secondary education. This is a synopsis of Real Women Have Curves; I’ll reveal why the film is so inspiring to me, I’ll give feedback from movie reviews, and I’ll use documents from my course’s textbook, to fully develop my ideas.
A woman in the workplace was common but they did not receive the pay they deserved. Often, a woman’s job was the same as the previous male, but they did these jobs for 53% of the male’s pay. (Tolman) Eventually many woman and men went on strike demanding equal pay.
While the girl loved the work outside she hated to do the ‘woman’s work’ inside. She disliked her mother for making her do it, and believed that her mother only made her do it be...
Exact Beauty: Exploring Women's Body Projects and Problems in the 21st Century. Mandell, Nancy (5th ed.). Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality (131-160). Toronto: Pearson Canada, Inc. Schulenberg, Jennifer, L. (2006).
It can be concluded that women are treated in terms of stereotyped impressions of being the lowest class and greater evidence can be found that there are large disparities between the women and the men 's class. It can be seen that women are more likely to play casual roles as they are most likely to take seasonal and part time work so that they can work according to their needs. They are hampered from progressing upward into the organizations as they face problems like lack of health insurance, sexual harassments, lower wage rates, gender biases and attitudes of negative behavior. However, this wouldn’t have hampered the participation of the women in the work force and they continue to increase their efforts which is highly evident in the occupational and job ratios of females in the industry.