Blog #11

For another class, Cinema and Justice, I was required to watch “Norma Rae” starring Sally Field. This movie touched on numerous issues of justice, among those were women’s rights and one woman’s struggle to work, care for her kids, and still stand up for what she believed in. The film is about Norma Rae, a single mother with two children from two different fathers who works in a local factory. While the story is mainly about the struggle to establish a union for the textile workers, there are many underlying issues that address her struggle as a low income working mother. Norma Rae has no steady father figure for her children. She works constantly for extremely low wages and in awful working conditions. She lives in a society that is dominated by white males and has to prove herself as a strong person because she is a woman. Norma Rae is often stressed out and exhausted throughout the film because she is constantly juggling various responsibilities. From taking care of her children, to her eventual husband, to working, and to establishing a union, Norma Rae truly represents a woman’s struggle to balance work and home life. In one scene, her husband screams at her for not doing the cooking, cleaning, and tending to his sexual “needs”. In this scene however, Norma Rae screams back and basically just “cracks” and her husband and the audience realize how stressed out this woman is with her juggling act.

I think this movie adequately represents the daily life of a working woman, even if not all of them are attempting to start unions. There are always numerous stresses and responsibilities of a working mother that seem to leave them with very little time to actually rest or enjoy themselves. While I watched this film, I do remember thinking how unfair it is that on top of working, women are also bombarded with all of the household responsibilities. They are either expected to do it by their husbands and society, or they feel guilted into doing it because of society’s message that they are a woman’s chores and responsibility. I thought about what was discussed in previous blogs and how women are juggling far more responsibilities than men, because when they get home from work there is plenty more waiting for them inside the home. In the women’s stories in “Putting Children First”, you can tell that these woman feel the strain of these similar everyday struggles.