Gender Roles In Brave New World

Gender roles are behaviors and attitudes that are expected from a male and female by their society. In Aldous Huxley’s World State, society practices gender roles because of their biased caste system, the assigning of reproduction responsibilities and their forced sterilization of only one gender. “Brave New World” takes place in 632 A.F or the year after Ford, they cherish Henry Ford’s perfection of the assembly line by implementing it into their society. In the World State, humans are mass produced and grown with the assistance of an assembly line. Once their born from their bottles, as toddlers, they are conditioned to love their pre-determined social role and hate all other roles that are not their own. They are taught/conditioned to feel

In Huxley’s world, before gametes go from embryos to babies, a pre-determined social role is assigned to a group of mass produced twins. Out of the available caste’s children are chosen to become an Alpha (being the highest caste), Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon (being the lowest caste). Although, all throughout the book only men are described to be in roles of power. For instance, at the very beginning of the book as the director introduces the students to the various rooms of the hatchery and conditioning center Huxley notes, “Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebook, the boys scribbled like mad” (Huxley Page 2). This prime example shows how women are subjected to discrimination by not being given the same opportunities that are given to men. Another gender role women are subjected to is their reproductive responsibilities. The Director suggests that their always needs to be a safety plan when It comes to reproduction, as a result he states, “As many as thirty percent of female embryos are allowed to develop normally, the others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four meters for the rest of the course” (Huxley Page 12). The resulting effects cause those women (also known as freemartins) to have masculine features and are guaranteed to be