Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Shirley, who is not yet Mrs. King, is about to start her first day as a teacher at Peckham School for Boys and Girls. She’s full of pride as she walks through the halls in her neat, professional outfit, determined to be a great teacher who will propel her working-class students into greatness. Shirley herself is a local girl who made it in life and is here to give back to her community. Shirley is especially proud for having made it because her older brothers didn’t. Her brothers were spoiled, spared from housework and allowed to speak their minds. Now Shirley is the “Family Success Story,” a university graduate who makes her parents proud.
Shirley, the second generation daughter of immigrants, has achieved the elusive upward mobility that the myth of meritocracy promises. Of her parents’ children, she was the only one able to do this, despite the privileges her brothers had as the boys of the family. Shirley believes in the power of education to help Black and brown children of immigrants achieve the same that she did. Through her work as a teacher, she is determined to reform society from inside its institutions.
Themes
As Shirley passes a home economics classroom she thinks about how she won’t be a full-time teacher and housewife, a balancing act foisted upon women in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Instead, she and her fiancé Lennox have agreed on an equitable distribution of domestic duties. She enters her classroom and her students arrive excited to be in the young new history teacher’s class. Shirley is thrilled to be embarking on her journey to make history fun and relevant. She regales them with her motto: “the future is in the past and the past is in the present.” The students respect her, which she chalks up to her being relatable and excited.
Shirley is critical of the second wave feminist movement that earned women the right to work outside of the home and pursue careers while at the same time not necessarily alleviating their domestic duties. Moreover, the second wave feminist movement often prioritized the voices of white women, drowning out the voices of women of color like Shirley. Black women were already working both outside and inside of the home prior to the second wave movement. Shirley brings her passion into the classroom and her efforts to reform society. Her students find her relatable because they can see themselves in her. She’s Black and the second-generation child of immigrants. It’s critical for students to see themselves represented in their teachers and mentors.
Themes
Conflicts break out in Shirley’s multicultural classroom. A group of boys show up with swastikas and National Front badges, which she deals with by showing them pictures of concentration camps that shock them. Race wars break out in the classroom, and she shows them horrific pictures of lynching in the U.S. The students admire and love her deeply, showering her in gifts. The principal praises Shirley for her dedication and outstanding results. In her first review he tells her she is “a credit to her people,” and suddenly Shirley feels pressured not only to remain an amazing teacher, but also “an ambassador for every black person in the world.”
Shirley is reforming systems from within her classroom. She’s fighting racism from within her classroom, changing young minds before they go out into the world as adults and perpetuate white supremacy. Shirley’s white colleagues see her as representative of all Black people. To them she’s a “credit” to Black people who they otherwise view through negative and racist stereotypes. White people often see one Black person as representative of all Black people, flattening a worldwide, diverse group of people into one image and understanding.
Themes
Shirley hates eating lunch in the staff room with the old, grumpy teachers. They eat their English lunches of pork pies and Cornish pastries in contrast with Shirley’s salt-fish and sliced plantain, which she hopes they won’t notice and ask her to explain. A colleague reads a newspaper, and on the cover is a mugshot of a Black teenager, which feels personal and embarrassing to Shirley. Her colleagues never acknowledge her race, and she wonders if they’d understand if she confided in them about what it feels like to be attacked by the media or what it's like to watch women clutch their bags when she walks past them. Although her mother advised her against thinking people don’t like her because of her race, Shirley struggles to quiet the voice in her head that tells her every negative reaction from others is due to her race.
White people’s judgement for other cultures seeps into every aspects of daily life. Like Bummi, who points out how white people judge immigrants for shopping at immigrant-owned grocery stores, Shirley fears her white colleagues will pass judgement on her food and Barbadian culture. Just as her white colleagues see Shirley as representative of all Black people, when they see headline news about a Black person they lump all Black people together as criminals. White people get to be individuals, while people of color are one homogenous group in the eyes of white supremacist society. Shirley’s coworkers adhere to the false notion of “color blindness,” ignoring Shirley’s race and therefore ignoring an important part of who she is. Shirley knows they wouldn’t understand if she were to confide in them about the microaggressions she faces on a daily basis, including from them, and she can’t escape the notion that every slight against her has to do with her race despite her mother’s advice.
Themes
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Shirley tries to charm the older coworkers who openly dislike her, like Penelope. Penelope is not just the only woman who speaks up in staff meetings, her voice overpowers all the men in the room. Shirley hates that the rest of the female staff is beholden to the decisions that Penelope and the men make without their input. In one staff meeting, Penelope rails against the half of the student body that misbehaves and performs badly on exams. Everyone knows that Shirley is referring to the kids of color, who are suspended when they misbehave while white kids get detention.
Shirley feels like she has to charm her way into her coworkers’ good graces, not because she wants it, but because it’s necessary to her survival in the school where her race and gender intersect to make her an outsider. Penelope thinks she’s being a fierce feminist by asserting herself against the male faculty but fails to recognize how her voice is drowning out the other women in the room, making her, in a sense, just as bad as the men who silence women. Penelope does not and cannot represent all the women in the school, especially Shirley and the students of color. Despite her liberal, feminist ideology, Penelope doesn’t recognize how race and gender intersect, how both movements are stronger if united together. Instead, she perpetuates stereotypes about her students of color. Rather than help fight against the structural injustices that leave students of color behind, she regards them with vitriol. The school suspends kids of color at a much higher rate than white kids, a troubling, common phenomenon that fuels the school to prison pipeline.
Themes
Shirley can no longer contain herself and speaks up against Penelope. She explains that she believes educating “our kids” is what will make society more equitable. She says that exam scores aren’t everything. The other teachers clearly want Shirley to take a seat, but when she asks Penelope who will help the kids if they don’t, the room goes silent with shock and excitement. Penelope responds by telling Shirley she isn’t a social worker and that she needs to work more than just one school year before challenging someone wearied by 15 years of experience.
Shirley can’t remain silent and speaks up in defense of both herself and her students. Shirley believes in the power of education to change society for the better. Shirley has a more expansive and progressive view of education. Penelope and Shirley represent two different generations butting up against one another. Penelope tries to wield her age and experience against Shirley, but experience isn’t everything. As a person of color, Shirley can relate to and understand her students on a level that Penelope will never be able to.
Themes
Shirley goes home to Lennox and regales him with talk about her hatred of Penelope, just one of many nights that she’ll do this. While he cooks she says that Penelope doesn’t deserve to call herself a feminist when she attacked Shirley, a woman who dared to speak up. Although she believes that power and privilege won’t disappear from society, she fiercely believes that she can help the disadvantaged through her teaching. Shirley believes that selective grammar schools have leveled the playing field for smart, marginalized kids who would otherwise be stuck in public schools. The current Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher, wouldn’t have climbed the ranks without such opportunities.
Shirley calls Penelope out on her hypocritical version of feminism. Like many second generation feminists, Penelope’s feminism lacks intersectional awareness. Her feminism is for white women alone, and unexamined, internalized racism excludes and marginalizes women of color. Shirley believes in the possibility of reforming society’s systems from within. She uses the example of Margaret Thatcher, but on the other hand Thatcher could be viewed as an example of how representation alone isn’t enough. Having a women prime minister means little if that woman upholds white supremacist, patriarchal norms, the way Penelope does on a smaller scale at the Peckham School.
Themes
Shirley admires Lennox as he cooks, a man who treats her equally and is risk averse just like her. They’re saving to buy a house and have kids. Shirley flashes back to meeting Lennox on the dancefloor in a bar full of Afro-Caribbeans who bouncers kept out of the city’s clubs where they wouldn’t hear their favorite songs anyways. They start dating and trade life stories. Lennox’s Guyanese parents sent him to live with his Great Aunt Myrtle in Harlem while they established themselves in the U.K. Aunt Myrtle stressed that school was the ticket to a better life. He returned to his parents once they had enough money, determined to do better in life then they had. In school he was a good student, but out in the world he was an enemy because of his race.
Shirley and Lennox are drawn together through their shared experiences as second-generation children of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. As was true for Shirley herself, and as she works hard to make true for her students, Lennox has achieved upward mobility through education. In Lennox’s case, the financial hardships and realities facing immigrants divide his family. He’s forced to spend a significant portion of his childhood without his parents, highlighting how immigrant divides homes and families with significant emotional impacts.
Themes
Starting at age 12 he’s stopped and frisked by the police, which leaves his body feeling violated and emasculated. Lennox is a good boy who avoids the bad boys, who is made fun of for wearing suits, and spends Saturdays at the library filling himself with knowledge as his Aunt Myrtle advised. His experiences with the police inspire him to become a lawyer, and now when they mess with him, he tells them and they back off. Shirley’s brothers survived similar experiences as all Black men were forced to. They had to be tough.
Like many Black boys and men, Lennox is harassed and threatened by the police from a very young age. Lennox was growing up in the heyday of stop and frisk in New York City, a policy that allowed police officers to stop and search anyone on the basis of any “reasonable suspicion,” which in practice just fueled the problem of racial profiling. Despite all the efforts Lennox makes to look like the good, hardworking student that he is, he’s stopped because his race leaves him suspicious in the eyes of the police above all else. These experiences leave Lennox physically and emotionally traumatized, and they also fuel his desire to reform the system from within as a lawyer. That choice to work from inside the system where he can use the system to fight back against corruption is his way of taking his power back. While Lennox and Shirley have experienced racism in different ways, they can share in their understanding of what it’s like to be discriminated against. Shirley knows some of what Black men go through from growing up with her brothers.
Themes
When Shirley and Lennox graduate they move to London and move in together. They get married and Shirley Coleman becomes Shirley King. Shirley’s best friend is Amma, who she’d known since they were 11, the only two Black girls in their class. Amma was shy and Shirley was protective of her. While Amma’s parents were educated socialists, Shirley’s parents were uneducated and apolitical. Once Amma joined the youth theater she found her voice and became a radical. Although Shirley believes it’s ultimately impossible to change society, she can’t live without Amma.
Shirley and Amma initially come together, and need each other, because they are the only two Black girls in a sea of white classmates. They find a necessary home and refuge in each other and their shared racial identities. At the beginning of the relationship, Shirley was the guide and protector, but after Amma takes the path of radical and Shirley takes the path of a reformer, their roles switch. Amma becomes the leader who later defends and protects Shirley. Amma and Shirley’s paths diverge in part because of their class backgrounds. Amma grew up with educated parents who were themselves progressives. Although her father was an immigrant, Amma’s life was very different from Shirley’s life growing up with two immigrant parents, both of whom were uneducated. Amma had more privilege, which granted her a greater ability to take the financial risks that come with a life as a radical changemaker. Shirley, on the other hand, needed to survive financially and wanted to achieve the upward mobility and success her first-generation parents sacrificed so much for.
Themes
When they were 16, Amma came out as a lesbian, which disgusted Shirley at first. Only after she’s convinced that others won’t assume she’s a lesbian by proxy, she becomes more, but never completely, accepting. Amma brings new, unconventional, mostly gay people into Shirley’s life that she finds fascinating. Lennox and Amma really like each other, even ganging up on Shirley, teasing her for being so uptight. He’s totally accepting of Amma’s sexuality because his Aunt Myrtle lived with her “special friend” for years until she died. Lennox had once discovered photos of his aunt and her lover dressed up in formal menswear. He wishes she was still alive so he could tell her how much he loves and accepts her.
Shirley’s discomfort with Amma’s lesbianism highlights how intersectionality complicates identities and allegiances. Although Shirley is a fellow Black woman, her homophobia impacts her perception of her best friend. In other words, although they both know what it’s like to be discriminated against, Shirley still struggles to fully accept Amma’s sexuality. Lennox accepts Amma’s sexuality easily because his aunt was gay, highlighting how exposure to different types of people from a young age helps foster acceptance.
Themes
As Shirley gains experience teaching, she remains passionate about helping her students. She fights against the conditions at her school, the large class sizes and lack of resources, as well as Thatcher’s Master Plan for Education, which forces her to use a standard curriculum among other restrictions. Soon Shirley feels like a “Cog in the Wheel of Bureaucratic Madness” and starts to feel overwhelmed by all the ways her students’ families are struggling in the face of issues like unemployment, addiction, incarceration, or poverty. The 90s are worse than the 80s, and by the 2000s the school is plagued by gang violence, drugs, and sexual assaults.
The limitations of Thatcher’s “Master Plan” is another example of how representation in positions of power is, by itself, not enough for true social progress. Both Thatcher and Penelope may be women who are boldly breaking into male-dominated spaces, but their lack of intersectional awareness means they are harming people of color in the process. In Thatcher’s case, her actions directly impact what Shirley is allowed to do. By forcing her to stick to a standard curriculum, one that is likely depoliticized, Shirley can no longer use her classroom as a radical space for transforming society. Working from within the system means having to work around and against its rules, a tiring battle that starts to burn Shirley out. She’s eventually overwhelmed by the difficult reality that educational reform alone can’t change the systemic socio-economic problems endemic in her students’ communities. She’s beginning to lose faith in the power of education alone to transform lives on a grand scale.
Themes
Shirley slowly slips into the mentality she once abhorred in her colleagues. She loses control over her classes, resents her students for their misbehavior, and doesn’t encourage them to pursue college. She’s tired of repeating herself, hates grading, and starts to bond with Penelope when she finds herself among the group of teachers ignored by the new, young, passionate ones. They despise the young teachers with their lofty ideals, and delight in their failures and burnout. Eventually, Penelope retires and Shirley’s left alone. She thinks about leaving to work in a private school full of polite, studious middle-class girls. She and Lennox themselves have bought into the “great middle-class scam” by sending their daughters to a private school.
As her older coworkers like Penelope predicted, Shirley has lost her passion entirely. She’s lost faith in her ideals and has become the kind of teacher she used to abhor. Although a Black woman herself, she looks down on her students through the same stereotypical lenses that her colleagues like Penelope do. Her mission to reform the system has failed, and now she’s perpetuating the same biases and beliefs she once fought against. Her story reveals how systems threaten to break activists down until they give into the status quo. Additionally, Shirley has given up on living out her ideals in her personal life, opting to send her daughters to private school as a matter of survival. From working in the public schools, she knows how Black children are viewed and treated within that system. Shirley at once recognizes that the myth of meritocracy and the middle class is a scam, while she is one of the lucky few who’s managed to make that myth reality. Society points to successes like Shirley and Lennox's to claim that society offers equal opportunities to those who work hard and play by the rules.
Themes
Shirley can’t completely abandon her morals, so she stays at Peckham. Her life has been a series of successes—an elite college acceptance, a job at the first school she applied to, a husband she loves, and a house in a nice neighborhood—so the prospect of rejection stops her from applying to another school. Over the years both Shirley and Lennox have changed. He never became a criminal barrister, sticking instead with a better paid position, which Shirley thinks was the right choice. Despite not being very religious, she and Lennox went to church every Sunday to get their daughters’ spots in the private school. Now, Karen is a pharmacist and Rachel is a computer scientist. Shirley reflects that she’s done well as the second generation in the U.K. and that her daughters have done even better.
Ultimately, Shirley’s idealism isn’t entirely lost. She still wants to believe in the potential for reform, but no longer lives by her ideals on a daily basis. Lennox, too, abandoned his dreams of reforming the criminal justice system, his initial motivation for becoming a lawyer, by taking a better paid legal job. Both Shirley and Lennox stayed true to the course expected of second-generation children of immigrants, and that has paid off, as promised, in the third generation, even more successful than their parents. Their story highlights the ways in which the need to survive and thrive as a person of color within a white supremacist society can mean abandoning one’s ideals to instead assimilate into the mainstream status quo. Activism is itself a kind of privileged lifestyle that flies in the face of the sacrifices that first-generation parents make for their kids.
Themes
Shirley and her family are on vacation at her parents’ house in the Caribbean. Her time spent at her parents’ house is the best part of her summer. Shirley thinks back to the school year. She’d started eating lunch in her car, when one day Carole knocked on the window. Shirley is shocked and thrilled when she asks for academic help. Shirley holds Carole to strict standards and she gets into Oxford. Carole’s success makes Shirley believe in the power of education to change lives again. From then on she’s motivated to mentor promising but at-risk kids with unsupportive families. They don’t all make it to Oxford like Carole, but even when a kid finds stability as a plumber she celebrates the success. Shirley’s mentoring makes her job more bearable but isn’t completely fulfilling. Carole, Shirley’s “greatest achievement,” never returned to her to thank her, and Shirley feel used.
Returning to her parents’ home country each summer offers Shirley temporary relief from the exhaustion of her life in the U.K. that, although materially successful, is spiritually deficient. Carole is a diamond in the rough that reignites Shirley’s passion. She works to help Carole become, like her, one of the lucky few who beat the odds to escape the poverty and hardship that await other second-generation children of immigrants like themselves. Shirley resolves that helping the promising few who come through the school is the best she can do, though it’s far from the democratic ideal she’d once so passionately believed in. In this new role as mentor, Shirley teaches students like Carole how to assimilate into white, middle-class English society, seeing it as the only path to the success she earned in the same way. In this way Shirley is perpetuating white supremacy, and, despite her good intentions, is robbing Carole of her culture and identity. Shirley takes credit for Carole’s accomplishments and feels entitled to her gratitude.
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