Analuisa Molina
Kerry Jones
LIT/225
March 9, 2015

Whose America? “This is a Man’s world….” Or so sings James Brown. Weather we want to accept it or not, the world is still dominated by mainly by white men. But women, Native Americans and African Americans have come a long way. Over the course of history women, Native Americans, and African Americans have seen America’s promise of freedom and equality for ALL people as a promise that was not kept. (Baym, 2012) Women were raised to be prepared to live as a loving slave to her husband. (Paxton "Women's Movement")They were not really allowed any freedom. They could not have an opinion or speak their mind. Women did not get to have an education and the definitely did not get to go to work. (Paxton "Women's Movement") They were brought up to believe that they were put on this earth to serve a man. Their ultimate goals in life were to find a man, marry him, to give him children and to create and keep up a loving home for him. (Paxton "Women's Movement") All of this is still relevant today, maybe not as extreme, but it is. Modern women are allowed to get an education of their choice and have an opinion, but the majority of the world is still sexist. (Paxton "Women's Movement") As a woman, your duties are to get an education, get a job, spend your whole life waiting to finally get married, have kids and support your husband in anything he does. Society tells women to go ahead and be successful, “but not too successful because you may threaten the man”. (Paxton "Women's Movement") The Native Americans have had it bad since the beginning. They were made to leave the land that had been their home for as long as they could remember. (Rooseveltown "Native American Women Projects") They were accused of being savages and many of them were killed off by diseases that they had never come in contact with before. (Rooseveltown "Native American Women Projects") The African Americans were not even looked at as a whole human being for a long period of time. Some people saw them as less than their pet dogs, others saw them as, the Declaration of Independence out it, three fifths of a person. (Miller "Slave Narrates") They were bought and sold like a piece of furniture, treated worse than animals, overworked, and not paid anything. Even after the civil war and the civil rights movement there are still people who refuse to see African Americans as an equal to them. (Miller "Slave Narrates") The founding fathers put one specific line into the Declaration of Independence that stands out to people who have abolitionist qualities in them. That line is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”. People like Ronald Regan, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. used this quote in many a speech when they were trying to get the people to rise up and make a difference in the world. (Baym, 2012) Their rhetoric was to get the world to start a movement to see everyone equally on their own terms, not because they were going to be forced to do so. (Baym, 2012) Before the Civil War, literature was not a huge topic of interest. (Baym, 2012) A few works that emerged before the Civil War were: “I’m Nobody” by Emily Dickinson, “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, “The Scarlett Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Sowe, “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poor Richard’s Almanac” by Benjamin Franklin, “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, and “The Declaration of Independence” written by Thomas Jefferson. (Baym, 2012) All of these works were written before the Civil War and all of these works are very opinionated and thought provoking. I think that that is what the main purpose of literary works from the pre Civil War era were made to do. (Baym, 2012) To influence the public to think about things a different way and see the errors in their ways of life and to get them to want to make a change. You cannot change people,