Social Norms And Values In The Movie Mona Lisa Smile

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The movie Mona Lisa Smile is about a woman, Katherine Watson, who is looking for a job as an art history professor. She ends up getting an opportunity at her first choice Wellesley College for women. She moves from California to teach there with full knowledge that the college is known for being conservative in nature and she is more of a radical compared to the ways of the 1953 culture. Throughout her first semester teaching on campus she had to fight to get her students to listen. They did not want to see what Katherine was saying and seeing, so she had to come up with ways to open their eyes to nontraditional art and life. She also tried to open their eyes so that they would think for themselves and act for themselves instead of doing what everyone else wanted and told them to do. After having been there for the first semester she convinces a student of hers, joan, to apply to Yale law school. Joan did not want to at first because she was taught that you cannot get a further education if you want to have a family. Katherine has to explain to joan multiple times that she can have both, an education and a family. Katherine ends up becoming engaged over the christmas break but breaks it off because she was starting to be influenced …show more content…

Women were supposed to be perky and always happy with a low intelligence level. If a woman wanted to have a degree to further herself she would get an education degree. That way she could still take care of the children and house once she was married. Marriage is something that she was supposed to do before she even got through college if she even had the opportunity to go because her dream was supposed to be to have a small house in the suburbs with her husband and children. The only things that she was supposed to care about were the children, the house and frivolous objects (Makers: Women Who Make

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