Themes Of Pauli Murray

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Pauli Murray was a double minority. She was plagued by being visibly black and a woman. These are labels that held her back and caused her great discrimination and pain throughout her life. Pauli Murray labeled the disfavor she faced because of her skin color and sex “Jim Crow” and “Jane Crow”, respectively. She used these terms to help pinpoint and vanquish the problems that people facing such discrimination encountered in society. I will identify the ways “Jim Crow” and “Jane Crow” both had a hand in discriminating against people like Pauli Murray, and the many key differences in the ways they affected lives and were indoctrinated in society. From an early age, Pauli Murray experienced widespread discrimination through “Jim Crow”. “Jim Crow” …show more content…

As much as she fought for equality of the races, she fought just as hard for the equality of the sexes. Murray first faced “Jane Crow” when she went north, in her search for a non-segregated college. She decided she wanted to attend Columbia University, but when she visited with her Aunt Pauline, she learned that Columbia enforced a different kind of segregation; it didn’t admit women. Pauli was disappointed, but didn’t give up on her search for a college up north. She finally settled on Hunter College, an all girls college. At Hunter College, girls were treated as leaders and fully capable of anything. Because of the positivity surrounding her education at Hunter, Pauli didn’t think so much about discrimination against women again until she left her all-girl college and went to Howard Law School, where she was the only woman in the Law school student body. One woman against many male students, Pauli found it hard to have her voice heard and her opinions taken seriously. Later, when she attempted to go to Harvard University for graduate study, like most of her successful teachers and classmates, she found out that they didn’t accept women into their university. Though she tried hard, they never let her in and she had to choose a different university for graduate study. This plagued her for quite a while as she felt she didn’t receive the …show more content…

Sexism was not being fought against in society in the early 1900s like racism and segregation were. Even though women did (and still do) struggle with getting their rights put into laws (like the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote, which was ratified in 1920), the biggest area they faced discrimination in was socially. During the 30s and 40s, women weren’t excluded from jobs and politics because there were laws in place. They were just treated as less than or incapable because of the way men, and even other women, had been socialized to think of them. The only thing holding them back was society and the culture surrounding them in the US. African Americans were forced by law to attend separate school from whites. In contrast, women were barred from attending many schools because of custom, like in the case of Pauli Murray, when she tried to go to Columbia, and then Harvard. There were no laws declaring that schools had to separate males and females, but the schools still did it because of “the way it had always been”. Due to custom, women were denied opportunities, and African Americans were denied those same opportunities because of

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