Gender Norms Research Paper

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Gender is a powerful ideological device, which produces, reproduces, and legitimates the choices and limits that are predicated on sex category. An understanding of how gender is produced in social situations will afford clarification of the international scaffolding of social structure and the social control processes that sustain it. I would argue that the television we watch says a lot about who we are, not only as individuals, but also as a society. So, what do the most popular TV shows have to say about the history of our society and its gender norms, and is it possible to identify these norms when watching the most popular sitcoms of each decade? Discovering this will not only provide insight on how our ideas of gender have evolved, …show more content…

These societal roles have been changing for decades now. Traditionally, the men would have to go to their prestigious jobs outside of the home, serving as the sole breadwinner for their family. Women, on the other hand, were left at home to take care of the kids, do the household chores, and have supper ready by the time their husbands got home from work. On the off chance that a woman did work during this time, it was as a secretary, a nurse, or other type of stereotypical female …show more content…

During this time, “the ideal nuclear family turned inward, hoping to make their home front safe, even if the world was not.” This resulted in the “picture perfect family” seen on TV that consisted of the bread-winning, omniscient father, the subservient housewife, and their wholesome, loving children. For the people searching for a role in life during this Cold War era, television was now there to reassure them. In the book entitled Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s by James Gilbert, he states that “…Television projected a vision of American life into the home that could easily be emulated, in part at least, in those places in society that already resembled the ideal…” Despite the millions of people that didn’t have a similar lifestyle to those which were seen on TV, these shows reflected the “idealized gender roles of the time period, which set an aspirational norm, even if it did not reflect

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