Blog 5

3. Would you respond to “Girl” differently if we reversed sex and you imagine the narrator is male, a father advising a young woman on how to become the proper kind? Ultimately, what’s at stake in a woman, a mother, advising a young girl in this manner versus a man, a father, doing so? What are the implications?

I definitely would have responded to "Girl" differently if the narrator was a man, father figure advising the young woman on how to become proper. When the mother figure is advising the young girl, the tone of the story is more a sense of the mother telling her daughter all the knowledge she has learned throughout the years. This is to help her daughter become the perfect wife she needs to be for her future husband. If the story was told as a father's perspective it would have been more of a racist sense, since the male figure would be telling the daughter what he thinks the daughter should do to prepare herself of being the perfect wife. In the story it says how she should sew clothes, iron her dad's clothes, how to act like a lady, etc., so it would seem as if the dad was taking the responsibility in teaching his daughter how to act proper rather than leaving it up to the mother implying to the mother that she wasn't proper enough.