Their Eyes Were Watching God Women

Imagine a young woman who is looking for a loving and caring husband. She marries three men in total, but only one is ideal for her. The first is a man who treats her like a farm animal, constantly nagging her to do work. She escapes him by running off with another man, who is powerful and treats her merely as an object to show his superiority to her, and when he dies, she finally finds the husband of her dreams, who can provide everything a woman like herself so desires. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, these scenarios describe the journey of Janie Crawford, a young black woman from post-slavery times who struggles through relationships with three men, all of whom have a different personality and ideology on women. Each man expresses his power over Janie in a different way, but Janie manages to escape from the power grasp of two of her husbands, who did not meet her standards of a loving and caring husband. Throughout the novel, Janie Crawford struggles to cope with the power exerted over her by two of her husbands in various ways. The first of Janie’s husbands is a farmer who is much older than Janie named

Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home” (51). This shows how Jody believes that women, particularly the wife of one in power, ought to submit to their husbands and stay out of their business. Janie is also forced to stay in the store and work and is not allowed outside, because Jody believes she is too good to interact with those people. However, overtime, the resentment builds up, and when Jody is dying, she finally lets out all the anger accumulated over a span of twenty years by berating and scolding him mercilessly right before he