Analysis Of Malcolm X's Only Daughter By Sandra Cisnero

Malcolm X’s article “A Homemade Education” discusses his journey through prison and how the experience helped him meet his expectations of himself and of the African American community. He explains his life in prison as a time in which he transitioned himself from uneducated to educated by the use of literature and writing. Sandra Cisnero’s “Only Daughter” reviews the expectations that her father had for her life and how this was something that she always wanted to fulfill and his approval was what she strived for. Despite growing up in a household with six sons, she found her voice through writing and became the successful woman she is today. Through the two readings, it is evident that the background of the authors played an enormous role …show more content…
It was commonly known that woman should become housewives and raise the children. Although these may not seem like difficult expectations to live up to, for someone like Cisnero who wanted more for herself, it was something difficult to release herself from. Cisnero’s pressure to fulfill any sort of expectations came directly from her father. Her father believed that college was “good for girls – good for finding a husband” (367) and while Cisnero attended college for a total of six years, four years as an undergraduate and two years as a graduate student, she did not find a husband, leaving her father to assume she “…wasted all that education” (367). She writes, “everything I have ever written has been for him, to win his approval…My father represents, then, the public majority. A public who is disinterested in reading, and yet one whom I am writing about and for, and privately trying to woo” (367), clearly stating that her father was who she wrote to impress and to prove to him that her career in writing was not an education wasted. The pressure to become more than just a wife for Cisnero is can be viewed as relating to X by his feelings of pressure to become