contend

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contend against (someone or something)

To compete against someone or something. Andy hasn't trained enough to contend against other swimmers his age. If you push him to enter this race, he'll just end up disappointed.

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contend with (someone or something)

1. To compete against someone. Andy hasn't trained enough to contend with other swimmers his age. If you push him to enter this race, he'll just end up disappointed.

2. To struggle against or work to solve a problem or issue. I'm not ready to contend with that problem just yet—I need coffee first. How can we contend with these huge financial losses and still stay in business?

See also: contend

contend against someone or something

to fight or compete against someone or something. Do we have to contend against all this criticism? Ed refuses to have to contend against Eric.

See also: contend

contend with a problem

to put up with a difficulty; to struggle with the problems caused by someone or something. I cannot contend with your temper anymore. I wish we did not have to contend with this changeable weather.

contend with someone (for something)

and contend (with someone) for something

to fight someone for something; to compete with someone to win something. I don't want to have to contend with Sally for the award. I don't want to have to contend for the job with Ed.

See also: contend

References in periodicals archive ?

Regardless of their socioeconomic class, the main characters in Contending Forces understand the complex connections among material gain, education, social equality, and political representation.

This is exactly how whiteness functions in Contending Forces, whether or not Hopkins understood it in Harris's terms.

In Contending Forces, the loss is ostensibly incurred as a result of a rumor started by a lower-class white man upon first seeing Grace Montfort as she arrives from Bermuda with her family and their possessions.

In Contending Forces Hopkins depicts clearly the socioeconomic motivation sustaining the U.

The complexion of the main characters in Contending Forces, indeed, works to destabilize the notion that one can always accurately determine race by "reading" physical traits.

Indeed, she weaves throughout Contending Forces a discussion about Black women's putative responsibility for "the illegitimacy with which [the Black] race has been obliged, as it were, to flood the world.

Here, Harris is discussing the reputational inter est of sexual virtue and the moral defamation that occur when a white woman is "called" Black, concepts that clearly apply in Contending Forces.

Thus on many levels Contending Forces actively and complexly participates in turn-of-the-century discussions over the importance of property in "uplifting" African Americans and rewrites Washington's metaphoric "five fingers" compromise into a metaphor of two hands (one Du Boisian, one Washingtonian) working together.

Perhaps the most oft-quoted critique is that of Gwendolyn Brooks in her 1968 "Afterword" to the first reprinted version of Contending Forces.

Writing about Contending Forces, Dawson notes that, "through the tasteful parlor, equals may recognize each other, allowing a British diplomat [Charles Montfort-Withington] (who is apparently white) to claim a common heritage with a [Ma Smith]" (179).

For an in-depth discussion of the ways in which Hopkins engages with issues of motherhood in Contending Forces, see Berg.

For instance, Claudia Tate argues that, "if we view Contending Forces as Hopkins's dramatized expression of a tentative program for the advancement of black Americans in general and black American women in particular, we can surmise that black men and women must be responsible for the course of their own advancement and that duty, virtue, carefully controlled emotions, the institution of marriage, and the vote are the key components for directing social progress and achieving results" ("Pauline Hopkins" 59).

Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces.

Contending Forces: A Narrative Illustrative of Negro Life North and South.

"So strangely interwoven": The Property of Inheritance, Race, and Sexual Morality in Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces