Gender Stereotypes In The 1920's

The moment a child is born, society presents it a complex gift steering the course of its future. Gender is the most important social construct in the human life as it shapes the way we interact and navigate the world we live in. From the colours that the baby is wrapped in to the hues of wallpaper in the bedroom – a girl, is most likely to be thrown into a world of pastel pink and lavender, if you are a boy, you are most likely to be surrounded by bold red and blue hues. We are already starting to be forced into identifying with a specific gender. Dolls, plastic vacuum cleaners and Fischer Price kitchenettes are given to girls, and are taught that Barbie and Bratz dolls are gender appropriate toys; shopping, fashion and makeup is that which defines femininity. Boys are

As John Berger (1977, p. 7) says, “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” The child would have been brought up and groomed over time with the constant idea that as a girl or boy, there is a certain way in which you have to behave, a certain way that is accepted and considered the norm in society. Babies in the olden days up till the 1920s were commonly dressed in pink because it was closer to red and thus deemed as a ‘fierce’ colour, whereas girls were dressed in blue as it was considered a soft colour and the colour most commonly seen worn by the Virgin Mary.
Gender roles in the twenty first century world have had evolved over the centuries, the general idea that men and women possess distinct characteristics is often treated skeptically, but this is an almost universal view that has been held since the eighteenth century. Ideas about gender differences were derived from classical thought written by patriarchal societies, Christian ideology from the Catholic Church and science and medicine. Men and women were thought to inhabit bodies with different anatomical structures and that thought that they possess fundamentally