The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath doesn’t seem to necessarily address the issue of race but I don’t think it ignores it either. Discussing the matter of second wave feminism, that told women how they should act and how they should live. Back in the 1960s around the women’s movement women were told they belonged in the house taking care of the cooking, cleaning, the children, and their husbands. Women who refused to work at home and wanted real jobs they would get paid for like men weren’t even given equal pay. They worked as hard as men did but still received lower pay, and so all this created a movement. An example shown in the text of women who excepted the idea of being housewives instead of using their degree to get somewhere was Buddy’s mom Mrs. Willard. Esther says, “this seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew thats what marriage was like, because cook, clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself” (Plath 44). Esther doesn’t really come into much contact with people of color, so theirs no way in telling what her views towards race are but the way most people would assume. I would assume because whites were more privileged than people of color at the time, Esther would look down of them because she feels as if shes better than they are. Like the one time Esther came into contact with someone of color, “usually it was a shrunken old white man that brought our food, but today it was a Negro” (Plath 95). The fact that she called him a Negro showed how she saw people of color and had no respect for them.

Esther is a young, white women who is supposed to be one of the privileged ones because of her racial status and the opportunities she’s able to receive because of it. Now Esther is a smart girls, she doesn’t have a lot of money but she has enough to live on and yet she isn’t where she really wants to be. In that case I don’t think Esther is aware of the opportunities life provides for her because of her racial status. Or is she, and because of her mental state shes just confused about what she should do with her life. In Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and sex: Women Redefining Difference” talks about how white women had more advantages than black women but yet in The Bell Jar Esther didn’t take advantage of that opportunity, and neither did the other women in the book like her mother, or Mrs. Willard.