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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Women of Brewster Place, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Poverty
Sexism and Female Relationships
Sexuality
Motherhood
Religion
Summary
Analysis
Brewster Place, a housing development, was built as part of a crooked deal between a real estate developer who wanted to get rid of an honest police chief and an alderman who wanted the real estate developer to build on his relative’s property. Specifically, Brewster Place was a bone thrown to the Irish community, who would otherwise protest the police chief’s firing. At Brewster Place’s opening, the alderman claimed he championed it for soldiers coming home from WWII.
The narration does not state explicitly that the honest police chief is Irish, but the claim that the Irish community would protest his firing implies it. The alderman and the real estate developer are thus using their economic privilege to manipulate what was, in the first half of the 20th century, a social group that faced discrimination in the U.S.: working-class Catholic immigrants. The manipulation and oppression of these immigrants foreshadows the worse and longer-lasting discrimination that Brewster Place’s future Black residents will face.
Themes
A boulevard north of Brewster Place becomes a big commercial district. To “control traffic,” the city builds a wall between Brewster Place—where Italian immigrants live—and the district. Many children who grew up in Brewster Place don’t return as adults.
The city literally builds a wall between Brewster Place, a Catholic immigrant neighborhood, and a booming commercial center, symbolizing how powerful interests use their power to structurally disadvantage groups like immigrants and exclude them from economic opportunities. Yet when the narrator says that children who grew up in Brewster Place don’t return as adults, it suggests that white immigrants have the option of abandoning disadvantaged ethnic enclaves and escaping discrimination by assimilating into the U.S.’s white majority culture.
Themes
A Black man, Ben, moves into Brewster Place as a janitor a year before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The Italians don’t complain because they need his janitorial help given their absentee landlord. They soon learn that if they hear him singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” he is drunk and won’t work that day, while he learns that while the Italian ladies bring him food, they’ll never accept him into their homes.
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled racial segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional. Though Ben “integrates” Brewster Place in 1953, one year before Brown v. Board, he quickly learns that his white immigrant neighbors won’t accept him. This lack of acceptance shows how social attitudes about race can lag behind legal progress toward racial equality.
Themes
Eventually, Black residents replace the Italians in Brewster Place. Unlike the previous residents, they will not eventually be assimilated into the larger white population and so are less likely to leave the neighborhood. Black women try to make Brewster Place into a home—and each one has her story.
Here the narrator makes explicit a point that was implied earlier: white immigrant groups, even those that initially face discrimination, can eventually integrate into the U.S.’s majority-white culture in a way that Black people are not allowed to do.
Themes
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