A Dream Deferred In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

In Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, she tells the value and purpose of dreams and how oftentimes dreams do get deferred. Hansberry got the title for the play based off of Langston Hughes’ famous poem A Dream Deferred. The language Hansberry uses reflects the deeper meaning of Hughes’ poem. Although the Younger women have lived in the same apartment for generations, they each face their unique trials and tribulations. Mama is faced with the decision of how to spend the money she received from her deceased husband’s insurance settlement; Ruth has to choose if she wants to have an abortion; and Bennie continues her aspirations of being a doctor and young feminist in the 1940s. All three women’s stories fall back on one common factor: a dream deferred.
With the time the play was set, Mama was probably about 60 years old and born around 1890. Mama had to endure big historical moments as a young woman, including World War I, prohibition, and the passing of the 19th amendment allowing women the right to vote in 1920. This influenced the way she raised her children, especially Beneatha, who was an aspiring doctor. According to Ellen Carol Dubois in Three Decades of Women’s History, “In the work done on women’s history up to and through the 1930s, women’s suffrage was the centerpiece of all efforts to insert women into the flow of U.S. history” (51). Mama and her late husband, had the American dream of living in a big house in a nice neighborhood, but to get to their destination they had to live in an apartment on the Southside of Chicago first. Their dreams were deferred and they ended up living in the apartment for longer than expected. Mama said, “Always