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Discrimination of women
Gender discrimination
Discrimination of women
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The Role of Eve The female gender has come a long way. They conquered and triumphed over gender discrimination in the society. A woman is now a symbol of strength and love. This has not always been the case. The poem “Adam and Eve” by Ani Difranco illustrates how unfairly a woman can be treated. The poem elucidates the arrogance of men, putting women in a position where they do not feel appreciated. Also, the story “Boys and girls” by Alice Munro delineates the stereotypes of being a girl. The story talks about how a little girl and her brother were treated differently because of their genders. The male gender is believed to be better and more elegant. Men are more respected in the society. A man is given power and dominance over a woman.
The moment the narrators, who are both female, tries to act on their emotions, they get discriminated. The narrators in both the poem and story get constant reminder of their place in the society. Also, they know what role they should play as “female.” The society uses the word “female” like any other curse words. “You can’t do that because you are a girl.” In the story “Boys and Girls” the narrator defines the word girl. “It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment.” (Munro 144). The narrator feels like a failure. Nobody seems to appreciate her so she feels like she is disappointing everybody. She has no self-appreciation for herself. People would agree that men have an inborn advantage over women. Some women are considered strong. It might even seem that they possess the characteristics of a man. Yet, they are just aspirants who want to be like a man. Women emotions are heightened. Whereas, men are capable of withstanding dreadful situations. “Emotionality remains a strong and independent force in human affairs, influencing perceptions, coloring memories, binding people together through attraction, keeping them apart through hatred, and regulating their behavior through guilt, shame, and pride” (Lively, Heise 115). People act on their emotions. Sometimes their actions are unreasonable. The poem “Adam and Eve” shows the reader that narrator’s emotion is
Psychology is the state of a human’s mind and how it affects them as an individual. Self-esteem is defined as the level of confidence people have in themselves or their abilities and skills. Emotion can trigger psychological unstableness. In the poem “Adam and Eve”, the narrator is losing her mind. She relates her situation to occurrences in the bible. “I just happened to like apples and I am not afraid of snakes.” (Difranco 1256). She is having anxiety. It is causing her to have hallucinations that she is Eve, and lives in the Garden of Eden with her husband Adam. She also apologies to the man numerous times even though she did not do anything wrong. Her psyche is confused on what is right or wrong. The man is successful in his endeavor of torturing her mind and ridiculing her gender. This causes her to think everything is her fault. “When it does go wrong, our failing (low) self-esteem can get us to make self-destructive decisions such as tolerating mistreatment or harming ourselves or harming others in an effort either to make others love us or to numb us to the pain of our own worthlessness.” (Chowaniec 400). Men have the advantage of command. This makes them in a more controlling position, giving women a disadvantage. “To primitive man, egoism, as instinctive self-preservation, was neces- sary if the individual were to survive the rigors of his existence; but since brain has led man to
The poem starts with the line, “This girlchild was born as usual,” which suggests that as soon as a girl is born, society already expects her to learn the role she will soon play in when she hits puberty (1). Thus, showing why we are given dolls as little girls to illustrate how we should act and appear according to society. After we learn all the roles we will soon take part in, “the magic of puberty,” hits and girls immediately begin applying the ideals to their own lives (5). As if this attempt to conform is not enough we have other people telling us we are not to perfect. “You have a great big nose and fat legs,” says a classmate to the girl (6). This type of pressure can slowly but surely destroy even the little confidence women do have in themselves.
The idea and characteristics of gender, relate to the specific differences men and women deliver to society and the unique qualities and roles each demonstrate. The term ‘Femininity’ refers to the range of aspects and womanly characteristics the female represents. The foundation of femininity creates and brings forth many historical and contemporary issues. According to Mary Wollstonecraft in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, women’s femininity is considered a flaw of nature. Throughout the paper, history indicates how women are viewed and looked upon in a male dominated world which hinders a woman’s potential, her character, her mind, her dreams, her femininity. The paper particularly stresses the idea of power, the power of man. The historical argument leans towards man’s desire to treat women as inferior to them.
... history, it is proven that gender changes along with social, political, and cultural change. Despite all, many women continue to face other kinds of discrimination. Women continue to experience sexism, the idea of traditional gender roles. Women are still thought to be more involved in taking care of their children and the household. Women often face unconscious stereotypes in the workplace as well. In some cases, women have a less change of obtaining better, and higher paying jobs. Women often don’t get promoted to higher positions in office, despite their qualifications and experiences. Female candidates running for public office experience forms of sexism as well. The variations and adaptions of society are evidence that reinforce the idea that gender is formed under social construction rather than the essence from biology alone.
Since the beginning of time, women have been treated as inferiors by men. Due the supposedly weak anatomy their body, they have always been seen as weak and fragile, a description that can’t be farther from the true. Women have been proven to withstand a large amount of pain and have a stronger emotional stability. Just like racism, gender deferment has been less with the progression of time but it’s still a factor that is present in the everyday life of modern society. We can see this in the fields of work like science where it is rare to find a women scientist and how the technological world is mostly ruled by powerful male figures. Women have been oppressed since the beginning of time and have fought for their rights bravely and consistently, women went from not even being able to speak their own thoughts unless their husbands said so and being an incubator for male heirs to being inspirations to many people and fighting for what it’s right. We, as a society, have progressed in that way through the ages, even though, some women are still being oppressed daily on various parts of the world, it is something that we must overcome and we will, because this world is a better place with more smart, educated and outgoing
Although we may see that females have the same rights as males in most circumstances, there is still a gender norm which controls how each gender should act. Women have fought for their rights and have been successful but the gender norms are still holding females back from being able to freely enjoy what males enjoy. Our society has been governed by these gender norms that help control how each of us as males and females should live. These gender norms help guide us through our life as being a male and female. When we were born, we are able to see our gender as displayed by someone else and we learn on how we should also act as well. These gender norms help guide how we live our lives and what we do with ourselves and helps make our decisions when we are unsure. In educating ourselves, gender norms are visibly throughout the education system as males and females are taught what is acceptable by each gender and how we should act. If we act outside of these gender norms, we are considered deviant and different. In school we are taught as males and females in what courses we should be taking and how to act as a male and
Throughout history, women have been mistreated as the weaker gender. It has been evident throughout the epic of Sunjata, the history of Greek society as well as Indian society. It is evident today with the social classes we have formed that there are predominant gender roles in our society; history as we know tends to repeat itself.
In our present era, there is no doubt that the evolution of women's rights has come a long way. It is in the Western Culture that these values for which women have fought for generations, are in conflict with Genesis 1-3. The events that occur in this "creation story" are crucial in that it begins when God creates man in his own likeness and man is given domination over all living things. The significance is the prominence given to men; God is male and his most important creation is male. The biblical account underlines the supremacy of man while making it clear that women play an inferior role. Furthermore, the biblical account also describes how woman are disobedient and yield to temptation, the result of which is the expulsion of both Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. In the poem "How Cruel is the Story of Eve", Stevie Smith's castigation towards the biblical story of Eve demonstrates how women have been victims of despair and suffering since the beginning of time. She holds it responsible for cruelty towards women in history, she implies that the values derived from the story of Eve were forced upon women without choice, and finally, she challenges the authenticity of the religious tale on a whole. Without a doubt, women have fallen victim to an untrue, religious tale from the beginning of time, and the poem is an outcry representing the suffering of women throughout history.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.
Gender roles contribute to both the past and the present. However, gender roles were a bigger issue in the past. Men were seen as superior to women. More specifically, I’d like to focus on gender roles that convey male dominance. The superior roles of men are prominent in many works of literature that I am associated with such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
For the past few weeks in class we have been focusing on the topic of gender and sexism. Gender is what traits an individual identifies with. Sexism is prejudice, stereotyping or discrimination that is typically against women. Through the films Boys Don’t Cry and Courage under Fire we explored how gender and sexism can be a reality and struggle for some every day. The films did a respectable job of showing different versions of sexism. In Boys Don’t Cry we saw sexism against an individual who is transgender and in Courage under Fire we saw a female officer in the military that experienced sexism.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” she tells a story about a young girl’s resistance to womanhood in a society infested with gender roles and stereotypes. The story takes place in the 1940s on a fox farm outside of Jubilee, Ontario, Canada. During this time, women were viewed as second class citizens, but the narrator was not going to accept this position without a fight.
It is important to educate boys and girls on women’s studies because we are still living in a man’s world and no one should settle with mistreatment. The phrase, living in a man’s world, can also be translated as patriarchal system. In Women’s Voices Feminist Visions a patriarchal system is defined as, “a system where men and masculine bodies dominate because power and authority are in the hands of adult men.” (Susan M. Shaw, Janet Lee 7). Women’s studies is also one of the best ways to speak about sexism. Sexism is stereotyping, discrimination, and being prejudice against someone, usually a woman, based on their sex. Together, patriarchy and sexism are both issues that are tackled through feminism, now let me explain it’s two parts. First, it is to create equality and justice for all which shows why it counteracts
She wrote this novel to inform readers that there are differences and similarities between the genders of male and female and how each of their minds work. She says, In other words, when we are not thinking of ourselves as “male” or “female” our judgements are the same. This quote directly shows us that she is trying to tell us what life is like with each gender.
Male and female were treated differently in terms of gender still in the year 1955, when this story first publish. People were living with the mentality where male were given a high position in society. Perhaps this was the cause of same mentality, male characters in the story don’t treat women as their equal. Gender discrimination has deep roots in history and was still exist in 1955. In this regard, there was an article published in New York Times dated February 16, 2013 by Stephanie Coontz named “Why Gender Equality Stalled”; she writes, “In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable”. For this reason, one can conclude that gender discrimination was present in 1955 when women were consider as the one who should always look after children, do household stuff and were powerless regarding their social position. Men, on the other hand, held a high social and economic statu...
When it comes to gender men tend to be superior to females. Society has portrayed certain characteristics to women and men. Society has created each gender to have their own specific roles. There 's this idea that femininity has been reconstructed males are more valued than females. These generalizations of gender the men or women are taught child usually from parents and teachers or someone older. Society has expectations from women and male. Men women are portrayed as to have emotions be more sensitive week and need someone to depend on. Men are taught at a young age to not show emotions, they have to be a leader, and be stronger than women are. And if men are failed to do what they are expected 2 they are seen as less of a man or disgrace to mankind. Men and women should be seen as equals they should be able to do the same things without people looking down upon them.