Gender Roles

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Term Paper Title	Gender Roles
# of Words	1909
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	7.64

Gender Roles

Gender Roles

     Children learn from their parents and society the conception of
"feminine" and "masculine."  Much about these conceptions is not biological at
all but cultural.  The way we tend to think about men and women and their gender
roles in society constitute the prevailing paradigm that influences out thinking.
Riane Eisler points out that the prevailing paradigm makes it difficult for us
to analyze properly the roles of men and women in prehistory "we have a cultural
bias that we bring to the effort and that colors our decision-making processes."
Sexism is the result of that bias imposed by our process of acculturation.

     Gender roles in Western societies have been changing rapidly in recent
years, with the changes created both by evolutionary changes in society,
including economic shifts which have altered the way people work and indeed
which people work as more and more women enter the workforce, and by perhaps
pressure brought to make changes because of the perception that the traditional
social structure was inequitable. Gender relations are a part of the
socialization process, the initiation given the young by society, teaching them
certain values and creating in them certain behavior patterns acceptable to
their social roles.  These roles have been in a state of flux in American
society in recent years, and men and women today can be seen as having expanded
their roles in society, with women entering formerly male dominions and men
finding new ways to relate to and function in the family unit.

     When I was growing up a woman was never heard of having a job other than
a school teacher or seamstress.  Our(women's)job was to take care
of the house.  We had a big  garden out back from which we got most
of our vegetables…A garden is a lot of work you know…We also had to
make clothes when there were none to be had(hand-me- downs)

     Gender can be defined as a social identity consisting of the role a
person is to play because of his or her sex.  There is a diversity in male and
female roles, making it impossible to define gender in terms of narrow male and
female roles.  Gender is culturally defined, with significant differences from
culture to culture.  These differences are studied by anthropologists to
ascertain the range of behaviors that have developed to define gender and on the
forces at work in the creation of these roles.  The role of women in American
society was conditioned by religious attitudes and by the conditions of li...

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