Traditional Gender Roles In The 19th Century

Mary Beth Norton is a historian who specializes in women’s history, her interview with Barker-Benfield uncovers her experiences and involvement in discovering the importance of female involvement in the late 17th, early 18th century history. Mary Beth and professor Peter Lapsion’s He Said, She Said article both explain why gender roles were so important in shaping and revealing todays gender morals in society. Mary Beth explains in her interview that in order to get a clear understanding of history, both women and men needed to be included to look at life in the 17th century. Norton clearly states that men and women had secret lives that were written in their dairies. Historians could dissect both genders inner thoughts and experiences and get a true understanding on what troubles they were physically and psychologically dealing with, and use that information to better interpret the human beings mind in early century history.

Abstract Literature holds the power to reveal the same nuances throughout ages. Be it the 17th or the 20th century, domination, control, authority have arisen the interest and curiosity of both writers and readers. What makes these concepts exceptionally luring and mesmerizing? Power and more precisely, gender power, has gradually been invested with great significance. Providing their writings with various meanings of the noun “power” John Fowels’s “The Collector” and William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” have fully succeeded in firmly establishing this notion.

This power in the Marxist paradigm held by the bourgeoisie and aristocracy results from their possession of the means of production, which in turn assures the unconstrained access to the superstructural goods, e.g. education and politics, that is cultural goods not related directly to the process of production. The access to those can perpetuate dependency between the oppressed and the oppressors as it maintains or regulates the social divisions. The feminist perspective, on the other hand, assumes men as the enemy with their patriarchal construct of womanhood imposed upon women along with

Gender definitely determines and structures the world in which these characters live. The women in Sense and Sensibility were more interested in obtaining a husband due to financial difficulties than that of a good education. Gender stereotypes are seen throughout this novel, as educational success was only deemed important for the more superior men. Social orders reflect the differences in social class and gender. We see Austen use the economic position of women to show the powerlessness they had which underlies the pressure of marriage and the vulnerability

Nurture Nurture dominates nature in determining gender roles One of the oldest arguments is the nature vs. nurture debate in determining gender roles. However, by now it has been established that both nature and nurture plays a role in determining gender roles. The question arises which one dominates the other. It is important to know the difference between the two terms Sex and Gender first. According to sexologists John Money and Anke Ehrhardt, sex and gender are separate categories.

Literacy plays an important role in every woman’s life. Men and women should have equal rights in education. The women 's liberation has vital in the eighteenth century, particularly in the Enlightenment. In this social and philosophical development, there was a contention over equality and gender differences. The political inceptions of women 's liberation originated from The French Revolution (1789).

As George Orwell had expressed through the novella, although dreams of creating a strong, equal society seemed so palpable upon the creation of communism, class division was inevitable and would remained to be a prominent issue by suppressing the poor and weakening the society as the ruling powers corrupt. After the rebellion, class division was still existent, and there was a clear social hierarchy within the animals

The idea of confinement was originated by the elites as a new attitude towards the ‘idle’ and poor came about. Societies, especially in cities, became obsessed with ridding themselves of labor problems that they linked to the unemployed, or impoverished beggars. The idea of ‘madness’ and the need for those who fall into that category was created by a society who began to place an extremely high ethical value upon

The root cause for the women’s oppression, as Engles introduces, is the private ownership of property. Within capitalism, the family becomes an exploitative institution in which men demand women’s services making the relationship between men and women in society similar to that between the bourgeois and proletariat. Engels emphasizes that the rise of socialism will create a society that will socialise housework and childrearing duties, thereby removing the gendered labour that causes women to be doubly oppressed and creating an classless work force. Engels’ thesis not only laid out for the first time the theoretical framework for understanding the source of women’s oppression but it also provided a clear vision to women’s

Hartmann defines patriarchy as “a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence or solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women”. Therefore Marxist feminists argue that because the male is often the one going out to work and earning money to support the family that he has total economic control over his wife and children (family) which can negatively affect the family as he would be able to manipulate his family as he liked as he would be the one in control. Women are therefore denied financial independence in the patriarchal family