In the book, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Jim prefered the “hired girls” over the Black Hawk girls.
Jim liked how the “hired girls” were different than the girls in Black Hawk. He also didn’t see them as foreigners and liked how they work hard and didn’t live up to society's expectations.
Jim prefered the country girls over the Black Hawk girls because they were different. The Black Hawk girls didn’t do a lot of physical activity. For example, they were pitied when they had to walk more than a half mile to school. The girls stay indoors year round because it is either too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. They believed they were better than the “hired girls” but Jim liked how the “hired girls” were unique. Jim never really saw a difference between any of the Black Hawk girls, “I remember those girls merely as faces in the school room, gay and rosey, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders” (Cather 141). Jim liked how the country girls were set apart from the everyday town…show more content… The Black Hawk girls were much more respected because they were thought of as more refined since they were daughters of Black Hawk merchants and went to school. Since the country girls weren’t given the opportunity to have the kind of education and lifestyle as the girls in Black Hawk, they were seen as ignorant foreigners, “If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly” (Cather 142). Jim saw Lena’s grandfather as well respected and Antonia’s father as an intelligent, cultivated, and distinct man. They didn’t know much about farming or English when they first came, but they learned just as anyone else would. He had great respect for them because of all the hardships they went through unlike the Black Hawk girls. Jim didn’t see them as ignorant foreigners like the people in Black Hawk, he saw them as they
