LESSON 3 Flashcards
• Gender theory is based on two assumptions:
- a. [?] are charactenzed by power issues.
-b. [?] is constructed in such a way that males dominate females.
Male-female relationships
Society
• Gender theory focuses on:
- How specific behaviors or roles are defined as
- The key to the “creation of gender inequality” is the belief that men and women are
male or female
“opposite sexes.
When babies are born, they possess no knowledge and few instinctual behaviors. However, by the time children are about age 3 or 4 years, they can usually talk, feed themselves, interact with adults, describe objects, and use correct facial expressions and body language. Children also typically exhibit a wide range of behaviors that are appropriate to their gender. This process, whereby an infant who knows nothing becomes a preschooler who has the basic skills for functioning in society, is called
socialization.
: Adapting to Our Environment
Evolutionary Theory
A theorist would explain this gender difference in terms of the biological differences between men and women.
Evolutionary Theory
A man can impregnate several women at any given time, but a woman, once pregnant, cannot become pregnant again until she gives birth.
Evolutionary Theory
The time investment of these activities varies tremendously.
Evolutionary Theory
If evolutionary success is determined by how many offspring we have, the men win hands down.
Evolutionary Theory
: Learning from our Environment
Social Learning Theory
suggests that we learn gender roles from our environment, from the same system of rewards and punishments that we learn our other social roles.
Social Learning Theory
For example, research shows that many parents commonly reward gender-appropriate behavior and disapprove of gender-inappropriate behavior.
Social Learning Theory
Telling a boy sternly not to cry “like a girl:’ approving a girl’s use of makeup, taking a Barbie away from a boy and handing him SpiderMan, making girls help with cooking and cleaning and boys take out the trash- these little, everyday actions build into powerful messages about gender.
Social Learning Theory
Modelling after the same gender parent to win parental approval.
Social Learning Theory
: Age-Stage Learning
Cognitive Development Theory
assumes that all children go through a universal pattern of development, and there really is not much parents can do to alter it.
Cognitive Development Theory
As children’s brains mature and grow, they develop new abilities and concerns; at each stage, their understanding of gender changes in predictable ways.
Cognitive Development Theory
Piaget (1951), the child development theorist who suggested that social attitudes in children are mediated through their processes of cognitive development.
Cognitive Development Theory
=== children can process only a certain kind and amount of information at each developmental stage.
Cognitive Development Theory
: Our Cultural Maps
Gender Schema Theory
Bern suggests that one schema we all have is a gender schema, which organizes our thinking about gender.
Gender Schema Theory
From the moment we are born, information about gender is continuously presented to us by our parents, relatives, teachers, peers, television, movies, advertising, and the like.
Gender Schema Theory
We absorb the more obvious information about sexual anatomy, “male” and “female” types of work and activities, and gender-linked personality traits.
Gender Schema Theory
Gender schemas are powerful in our culture.
Gender Schema Theory
When we first meet a man, we immediately use our masculine gender schema and begin our relationship with an already established series of beliefs about him.
Gender Schema Theory
For example, we may believe that men are strong or assertive.
Gender Schema Theory
Our gender schema is more powerful than other schemas and is used more often, Bern argues, because our culture puts so much emphasis on gender and gender differences.
Gender Schema Theory
• Men are
• Men are
• Men are
• Men are afraid to
• Men are primarily interested in their
• Men do not have a primary interest in
tough and powerful.
unfeeling and insensitive.
logical, sensible and rational.
commit in a relationship and form an attachment.
careers or vocations.
marriage and parenthood.
• Women are
• Women are
• Women are
• Women can easily form
• Women do not have a primary interest in their
• Women are primarily interested in a
helpless and childish.
sensitive and intuitive.
scatterbrained, unstable and irrational.
deep emotional attachments.
careers or vocations.
long term relationship and parenthood.
➢Ester Boserup (1970), argued that differences in the role of women in societies originate in the different types of agricultural technology, particularly the differences between shifting and plough agriculture.
- Agriculture and agricultural technology
➢Shifting agriculture, which uses hand-held tools like the hoe and the digging stick, is labor intensive with women.
- Agriculture and agricultural technology
➢As a result, men in societies characterized by plough agriculture tended to specialize in agricultural work outside the home, while women specialized in activities within the home.
- Agriculture and agricultural technology
➢In turn, this division of labor generated a norm that the natural place for women is in the home.
- Agriculture and agricultural technology
➢This belief tends to persist even if the economy moves out of agriculture, affecting the participation of women in activities performed outside the home, including market employment, entrepreneurship, and politics.
- Agriculture and agricultural technology
- Pre-industrial societal characteristics:
MATRILINEALITY
MATRILOCALITY
DOWRY vs BRIDE PRICE
– refers to the fact that lineage and inheritance are traced through female members.
MATRILINEALITY
This can affect the residential patterns of married couples and the inheritance of property.
MATRILINEALITY
- with residence of the bride after marriage
Patrilocality vs Matrilocality
MATRILOCALITY
is a payment that a bride‘s parents make to the couple at the time of marriage.
➢Dowry
is a transfer at the time of marriage from the groom and/or his family to the bride‘s family.
bride price
• Women in [?] societies have greater access to land and other assets, either through direct inheritance and ownership or through greater access to the possessions of the large matriclan.
matrilineal
• Less reliant on their husbands and less vulnerable in the case of a husband‘s death.
matrilineal
• They have continued kin support, either by living with or near their own family after marriage or through ongoing connections maintained by matrilineal kinship
matrilineal
• Likely to have greater intra-household bargaining power vis-à-vis their husbands and have greater exit options than patrilineal women.
matrilineal
- Development of the Gender Construct in Industrial Societies:
a.Sexual Revolution in the Age of Enlightenment
b. The Civil Rights Movement
c. The Counterculture Revolution and the Stonewall Riots
c. The Counterculture Revolution and the Stonewall Riots:
c.1. The Counterculture of the 1960s.
c.2. Hippies.
c.3. Sexual politics.
C.4. The Stonewall Riots.
Sexual Revolution aka
time of “sexual liberation”
– social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world (1960s to 1980s)
“sexual liberation”
included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships (primarily marriage).
“sexual liberation”
• Contraception and the pill, public nudity, the normalization of premarital sex, homosexuality and alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.
“sexual liberation”
• Nearly 100 years after the Civil War, the civil rights of African Americans were limited by state laws and discrimination.
The Civil Rights Movement
Some civil rights are the right to vote, the right to equal treatment, and the right to speak out.
The Civil Rights Movement
• In the early 1950s, segregation was legal.
The Civil Rights Movement
Many Americans believed it should not be.
The Civil Rights Movement
African Americans went to court to end segregation.
The Civil Rights Movement
