I was Born Black and Female: A Womanist Reading of Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin in the Sun

‘I was born black and female,’ Lorraine Hansberry once said. These two identities dominated her life and writings. Rejecting the limits placed on her race and gender, Hansberry employed her writings to investigate what it meant to be a black woman in post-war America. Throughout history, black women suffer various forms of marginalization, discrimination, and oppression. The same is true of their position in literature. Because of the white monopoly of literary writing and production, black women were underrepresented in the dominant white literary canon. Hence the need to have a distinctive voice of their own. As a literary movement, Womanism tries to give black women that voice. It addresses the triple impact of race, sex, and class on black women. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) deals with a number of womanist issues like black man-black woman relationship, gender roles, images of black woman in the 1950s American society, black matriarchy and abortion. It centers around three black women as they grapple with the difficult circumstances they are facing in a largely white racist society