In honor of Black History Month February 6, 2022 I chose to write about Mary Weston Fordham who lived during the reconstruction era following the Civil War, read her biography.
The image below was the closest photo I have of washer woman since I will write about Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman". The photo below was a carving in jade shown at the Brazil National Museum in Rio de Janeiros, Brazil. I'm not sure what it is meant to convey, maybe a stylized frog, but the posture is similar to a woman scrubbing clothing in a river that I watched in Belize, scrubbing the clothing with rocks.
The image below was the closest photo I have of washer woman since I will write about Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman". The photo below was a carving in jade shown at the Brazil National Museum in Rio de Janeiros, Brazil. I'm not sure what it is meant to convey, maybe a stylized frog, but the posture is similar to a woman scrubbing clothing in a river that I watched in Belize, scrubbing the clothing with rocks.
Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman" appears in her collection of 66 poems titled Magnolia Leaves. The poem is written as seven stanzas of eight lines, with lines two and four and six and eight rhyming in each stanza. What is apparent from the poem is that Mary Weston Fordham had washed clothing and sympathized with the woman she was memorializing.
In the poem, she explicitly cites physical parts of the body affected by scrubbing clothing, the hands, the back, the arms, the legs, and the motion and the action and the sound. She repeats these traits to emphasize their tiredness when the poem makes a turn to God. Her glorifying Sunday shows how precious a day of rest could be and her homage to God for this break is heartfelt.
Writing Assignment: Write about a job that you did repetitively until exhausted.
See a modern poem about Washer Women below:
In the poem, she explicitly cites physical parts of the body affected by scrubbing clothing, the hands, the back, the arms, the legs, and the motion and the action and the sound. She repeats these traits to emphasize their tiredness when the poem makes a turn to God. Her glorifying Sunday shows how precious a day of rest could be and her homage to God for this break is heartfelt.
Writing Assignment: Write about a job that you did repetitively until exhausted.
See a modern poem about Washer Women below:
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