Gender Social Construction: Through the Eyes of an Older Generation

    For this interview and blog session I interviewed my mother. There is a lot we never talk about and for this assignment I was curious to see the picture that would be painted of her childhood as well as her future. I wanted to see just how much of her past and present was shaped by our social construction of gender and gender roles.

    For starters, I’ll begin with childhood. My mother, Sally, had a dad that encouraged her to play sports, even though it wasn’t entirely common for girls to play sports at that time. I somehow wondered if this had to do with parenting technique or if also had to do with the fact she had several brothers. Either way, although Sally loved dancing and cheerleading she also spoke about her time playing touch football and some times even baseball. A surprising fact I learned from this was that when she was in school, girls weren’t allowed to play hockey. This took me by surprise as it is my own favorite sport. And football wasn’t tackle football just tag football. Perhaps this an example of what Wollstenecraft talks about in the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1988). Women were seen as weak and often these things were believed to be pointless because women were just supposed to get married and have a family.

This brings me to the next topic that was discussed with my mom which was marriage.  Sally said that while growing up all but one of her friends had dreamed of getting married. She even went so far as to state that most of her friends went to college not to pursue a career, but rather pursue a husband and a future family. I think the fact that girls dreams relied solely on marriage says a lot about our society at that time.

Sally’s parent’s told her that she could be anything she wanted to be and she dreamed of never getting married, but rather of having a career. This is perhaps what Friedan talks about in the Feminine Mystique, where women were expected to shape their lives and dreams and roles around their family, often to the point of becoming depressed and feeling hopeless when their life consisted of nothing else (1963).

The more I listened to my mother’s story the more I could see how gender is socially constructed, just as Lober states (1994). Because it is so intricately woven into our every day lives we often times don’t stop to think about how society is shaping our view, our values and our lives on the simple basis of gender. At the time of my mother’s generation (she is now 55 years old), women’s roles were very rigid and submissive to men.

In one job Sally had worked at, she wore a pant suit to work and was immediately told by her boss to never show up in pants again. This was at a bank. I cannot imagine being expected to wear a dress or skirt every day as I save those in my closet for only special occassions. This is just another example of Lorber’s social constrution of gender. My mother was forbidden to wear pants to work because women were expected to dress nicely and look pretty, even if this means that she would be uncomfortable. Needless to say, she only worked there for a short amount of time before moving on to a different job with less rigid gender roles.

    As discussed in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and what Sally was talking about in regards to women’s roles, I can’t help but wonder if birth control was forbidden out of another attempt to keep women submissive and trapped. The more children women had to take care of, the less time they would have to pursue other goals and ambitions. My Fight for Birth Control written by Margaret Sanger was very eye opening in regards to this issue (1931). Because of the extreme situation Sangar’s patient would be left in as a mother with the birth of yet another child, she had tried not once but twice to abort her own baby and ended up killing herself in the process. No one would allow this mother to use contraceptives even though she clearly couldn’t handle having more children. It is no wonder why Sanger began to fight for women’s reproductive rights from there on out.

    As Sally finishes the interview she describes what she would like to see happen in her future talking about plans to retire in a warm state, while maybe working part time to stay occupied (she loves her job), as well as spending the rest of her free time with family and friends. Although this future involves family it is free from a lot of the constraints of gender roles and the choice is hers to make which wouldn’t have been the case when she was born. I am hoping this trend will continue and one day gender roles will be nonexistent with the freedom to do or be whatever one pleases without feeling oppressed.

 

Reference List

Friedan, Betty. “The Feminine Mystique” (1963). in Peter B. Levy, ed., 100 Key

Documents in American Democracy (1994). Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Sanger, Margaret. Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: My Fight for Birth Control (1931).

McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. New York: NY.

Wallstonecraft, Mary.  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text,

Backgrounds, The Wollstonecraft Debate, Criticism (1988). New York: W. W. Norton.