“Ira Singhal first in UPSC exam, top four positions secured by women.” This forms one of today’s newspaper headlines (on 5th July, 2015) following the result of Civil Service Exam conducted for India’s best minds. The emphasis on gender is quite significant here. Had the toppers been men, there would have been no such special mention of the gender role. This is essentially connected with feminism. A complex and broad concept, feminism can hardly be put into a single definition that would justify all feminist theories. There are lots of ways to approach this ideology, including liberal, radical and black feminism. While the liberal approach seeks to expand the opportunities and rights of the women; and the radical movement focuses on eliminating patriarchy; the black feminism blames racial biasness. Whatever the feminist goal may be, however, when represented in literary text, explicit or implied, it is fundamentally a feminist literature. This paper tries to view Langston Hughes’ Thank You Ma’am through the lens of feminism.
