A Doll's House Women Vs Men

Women Versus Men: Inferior or Equal. A Gender Role Comparison Throughout history every culture, society, and civilization has sought to define what it is to be male or female. Some of these societies were matriarchal in nature, but many more were patriarchal. These differences may have stemmed from religious ideology or may have been due, inadvertently, to geographical location. Perhaps it was simply a matter of how they decided to divide the daily labor or chores required to live and prosper. No matter how gender role is decided or perhaps despite how it has been determined, society feels a need to label and categorize, which is seen in the play, A Doll’s House. The purpose of this paper is to compare gender roles and how they have

It easiest to start with a definition. According to Oxford Living Dictionaries, gender role is “a role or behavior learned by a person as appropriate to their gender, determined by the prevailing cultural norms” (Oxford Dictionaries). In other words, society uses a sort of formula to determine how males and females behave within their culture or society. In the time setting of A Doll’s House, these sentiments appear to be based solely on gender stereotypes of the era (think Victorian England). Women are considered soft, weak, timid, and emotional (. Often times, there seems to be a biological basis or reasoning applied to gender roles (McLeod, 2014). Men are seen as stronger and more intelligent than women, therefore they should be the one to make not only the money to support their family but also all the decisions that affect them. Across the globe, these roles are inherently different based on that particular cultures norms. For example, in the play, women are supposed to take care of the children and manage the household. In many of today’s society, women can get an education, go to work, open a bank account and take out a loan, or they can decide to be stay at home mothers. The choice is theirs to

Women just did not work outside the home because the expectation was for men to be the one to provide economic support for the family. There were very few exceptions to this rule, however, a change in the mid-1800s granted women majority at the age of 25 if they were unmarried ( ). This began to open up doors for women of the time because they could obtain employment, albeit menial labor for the most part, the fact remained that they had won a small victory in the movement to gain more independence from a patriarchally dominated