Gender Roles During The Flapper's Movement

Gender roles are the prescribed behaviors of what is expected of males and females; in modern day societies males are given certain rights as are females. The feminist movement aims to equalize the rights amongst males and females. To exemplify, females protested and fought for the right to vote in the United States in 1920. During this very decade, females started the Flapper’s Movement in order to obtain social equality with men. During the Flapper’s Movement, young women, in a group known as “Flappers” asserted their social rights by doing the opposite of what society expected from females; wear short skirts, consume alcohol, smoking, driving and partaking in sexual norms. Additionally, there have been three major waves of the feminist movement

Holding back tears takes a lot out of any persons’ emotions. University of Manchester’s Billie Andrews reveals that the constant force for a boy to be emotionally repressed, hiding any emotions that negatively impact the boy, eventually leads to boys keeping events of sexual abuse to themselves (“Boys Don’t Cry”). After being consistently told to be “tough”, boys tend to ignore the magnitude of how much danger they are in for the sake of “being a man”. For example, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center of the University of Michigan provides statistics on male sexual assault encounters; roughly 16% of males have reported sexual assault according to the US Centers for Disease control in 2005 however, there are estimations that declare males report sexual assault even less than females (. A contributing factor to males not reporting sexual assault is because it is hard for society to believe males can be victim to assault because males are always “tough”. Masculinity implies that a male should repress any negative emotions and being a victim is a negative emotion. The fact that the idea of masculinity is so powerful it can force a boy to hide events of sexual assault spells that the male gender role is in need of attention; regardless of gender, sexual assault victimizes

In the working environment, there is focus on females having unequal salaries with males or where women are lacking. Sociology Professor of University of British Columbia, Neil Guppy, reveals statistics that point out males are more likely to become engineers; “. . .men with lower mathematics test scores are significantly more likely to enter and graduate from STEM degree fields” (Guppy 248). Additionally, “. . . domestic labor continues to be segregated into blue and pink jobs, with women disproportionately doing routine housework and childcare, and men concentrating most on non-routine domestic labor (e.g. fixing things)” (Guppy 251). Feminists have every right to argue for female inequality in the working environment; if women are able to score higher mathematics scores than males then they should have every right to obtain a STEM degree and enter fields of engineering. If women are able to prove throughout the course of the feminist movement that they are strong, they should be able to perform careers when they fix things. However, the perspective this writing takes doesn’t address how males fall victim to such careers; males are discriminated into performing non-routine domestic labor because they are supposed to be the “breadwinners” or perform physically demanding jobs. Just as females are disproportionately forced into domestic labor, so are males in STEM and engineering fields; if