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Stephanie Coontz’s speech, “The Way We Never Were,” debunks many social constructs about marriage that our society assumes to be true today. These include ideas about single parent families, divorce, choice of partners, and distinct spheres for men and women.
Many people believe that step families and single parent families has only emerged in recent history. However, this was the typical of many families in the early 19th century due to high death rates. For instance, many mothers would die while giving birth leaving the father to take care of the rest of the family. In addition, it was common that these single parents would remarry. Marriage was not about love but about property, so interestingly, the early step families would have many more problems with their new
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Despite the fact that there are thousands of years of evidence to go against these new gender roles, society assumed
these role as if they were absolute. There is evidence showing that these new gender restrictions created less happy marriages, for women began to feel dominated, and men felt the burden of being the sole provider.
Marriage has changed more over the last 30 years than the previous 3,500 years. As outlined above, divorce rates, step families, single parent families, love based marriage, and new separate spheres in which husbands and wives are place have caused great change. In addition, more recently we have experience even greater change. There is now about ten to fifteen years of sexual maturity before people are married. Since people have already had sex before marriage, neither sex nor marriage is connected to reproduction.Another change is fulltime housewives are no longer needed because consumer products substantially reduce the time and effort of taking care of a house. Due to this and multiple feminist movements, women can now enter the work force, but policies and laws concerning subsidized prenatal leave
finally the opportune moment for individuals to build a stable family that previous decades of depression, war, and domestic conflicts had restricted. We see that this decade began with a considerable drop in divorce rates and rise in marriage rates, which is often assumed as the result of changed attitudes and values. However, this situation cannot be only just attributed to women’s
shifted and women gained property rights.Also, in today’s society, we see a shift in this idea of
To start, Gender is constructed by society and therefore, it is constantly changing over time (Lorber, 2003). Gender is something that is acted out in each person’s everyday life or the routines of everyday activities. Gender is mostly carried out with simply thinking about the actions of specific genders. Gender roles are often expected soon after a child is born—a girl according to the gender roles, should wear pink and a baby boy should wear blue. Comments are often made before a child can even cognitively understand the idea of gender, such as, “he is going to be such a strong little boy,” or “she is going to be such a princess”. These ideas lead to socially-constructed gender and why men and women behave the way that they do.
Before the 1960s gender was not a recognised term apart from denoting masculine and feminine words (he or she). In the 1960s a phycologist named Richard Stoller (1968) deemed there was a demand for trying to define transsexual people, as their gender and sex did not seem to match. Transsexuals were biologically the same but chose to be a different gender. Thus the distinction between sex and gender was made. Moreover, it has then been developed to explain the common hierarchal dominance of males over females. This social constructivist stance taken by Stoller is very similar to de Beauvoir. It separates the biological (sex) from the social (gender). Both arguments put forward by both Stoller and de Beauvoir show that biological determinism between the sexes does not explain the experiences of transsexuals. Secondly it shows that the behavioural traits that are shown by men and women are seriously affected by social factors. Thus to support this, one might put together a Quinean Argument from Ontological Commitment to show that gender does
...socially directed hormonal instructions which specify that females will want to have children and will therefore find themselves relatively helpless and dependent on males for support and protection. The schema claims that males are innately aggressive and competitive and therefore will dominate over females. The social hegemony of this ideology ensures that we are all raised to practice gender roles which will confirm this vision of the nature of the sexes. Fortunately, our training to gender roles is neither complete nor uniform. As a result, it is possible to point to multitudinous exceptions to, and variations on, these themes. Biological evidence is equivocal about the source of gender roles; psychological androgyny is a widely accepted concept. It seems most likely that gender roles are the result of systematic power imbalances based on gender discrimination.9
In both Neuromancer and Dawn other characters use gendered stereotypes to devalue both Lilith and Molly’s gender. Both women support multiple physical enhancements that serve to push them more into the masculine by enhancing their strength. Through these enhancements characters not only take Lilith and Molly out of the female gender role but take them entirely out of the female identity. Both women are dehumanized as unnatural. Case and Molly meet a man named Terzibashjian who remarks on Molly: “‘In Turkey, women are still women. This one...’ The Finn snorted. ‘She’d have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at her crosseyed’” (Gibson 87). Terzibashjian takes Molly out of the female category because of her augmentations. She doesn’t act or present in the same way as the traditional woman in his society. He uses this to take away her humanity and her female identity. The gender roles of his society make Terzibashjian think this way. In this way gender roles have influence the way other characters interact with these powerful women.
Gender is intertwined in many of society’s institutions-education, religion, relationships, and politics- and because it is tangled up in all, it is very hard to change gender as an institution. It is very likely to be reinforced beginning in childhood; from children, adults, and peers. Because of the reinforcement, it is reproduced from parents to children and conforming is the easiest way to go through society. Change happens very slowly and although there is change from my grandmother’s experience to my own, I see the change as not very fluid- instead of water it’s more like heavy mud.
Throughout Gendered Worlds sociologists argue that gender and sex are socially constructed as opposed to being innate. The authors present evidence in regards to history, biology, and contemporary viewpoints using day-to-day examples. Although alternative viewpoints may argue that through biological perspectives, gender and sex are innate characteristics through deeper examination it can be determined that gender and sex are truly socially constructed.
Family life in the 1700's was highly valued and prioritized. Back in those times families were extremely large in size. There was much inter-marriages from generation to generation, Therefore, everyone in a community was most likely related to each other. Because of these extreme connections between communities, visiting fellow family members was very popular. Many of these visits were informal and prolonged. Out of everyone in a family, the women usually corresponded the most with other relatives. The lack of decently designed roads and great distances made the matter of traveling very important in social activities. In addition, the family was looked upon as a unit of production and enterprise. Most families in the 1700's contained usually twenty to thirty people. These large numbers were due to the fact that the families were extended. Every relative lived together, even if they were distant relatives. Families with ten or twelve children were common and those with twenty or twenty-five children were not regarded as abnormal. But, usually not all the children survived. Typically, four in ten children dies before they reached the age of sixteen.
Since the dawn of time men and women roles in society have shifted over the course of history. From the Paleolithic era, Neolithic era, to modern time. The moment we are born we are place into roles by society based on the gender we are. If you are born of female sex, society believe that you should act as a caregiver, be the responsible ones, and be ladylike, while on the other hand, the male sex are suppose to be tough, be provider, and be aggressive. There are three ways society enforce gender roles through the media, workforce, and education.
" The Social Construction of Gender" touched on how Western society views gender. This article pointed out historically how women and men appear to be separate species entirely. And that even though physiologically we are similar, male and female, we are of an opposite class. The male and female class should not be labeled how our bodies function for we are all individual and unique. If a scientist views a female to be female based on the fact that physiologically she menstruates, than what is a female that ceased menstruation or never began to? Is she only half woman? Is a male not a ...
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator and her husband John can be seen as strong representations of the effects society’s stereotypical gender roles as the dominant male and submissive female have within a marriage. Because John’s wife takes on the role as the submissive female, John essentially controlled all aspects of his wife’s life, resulting in the failure of the couple to properly communicate and understand each other. The story is intended to revolve around late 19th century America, however it still occurs today. Most marriages still follow the traditional gender stereotypes, potentially resulting in a majority of couples to uphold an unhealthy relationship or file for divorce. By comparing the “The yellow wallpaper” with the article “Eroticizing Inequality in the United States: The Consequences and Determinants of Traditional Gender Role Adherence in Intimate Relationships”, the similarities between the 19th century and 21st century marriage injustice can further be examined. If more couples were able to separate the power between the male and female, America would have less unhappy marriages and divorces.
The relationship that exists between gender and sex has been the root cause of global gender
From the century, the roles of gender are created by culture and society. The roles of males and females begin in the mother 's womb. For example, if a couple is having a female baby, they properly decorate the baby’s room with pink and if a couple is having a male baby, they properly decorate with blue. From our early age, we learned that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Also, I have heard folks saying, “Men do not cry” if they see little boy is crying. Therefore, unfortunately, we learned the roles of gender in our childhood from culture, society and family and it passes through the generations.
This happens since single parents normally hold a job and return home late from work or from other responsibilities. It is in these circumstances in which kids will learn to prepare a simple meal, do chores or maybe do some laundry if their favorite outfit isn’t clean. Those children who are raised in two-parent homes often don’t get as many opportunities to learn to take care of themselves since their mothers dedicate more time to them. Children will also realize that since their parents’ relationship did not last, that this could also happen to them, and they’d better be prepared to support themselves economically and to run a household on their own. Research shows, that as the single parent, women are the one helping their child/children shape who they are becoming and will be. Their character and characteristics will begin defining itself, both physically and socially. Values, habits and wants change over time as they become more