While it is valid to say that perhaps we have moved past an age in which men and women are to be assigned roles of breadwinner and homemaker by tried-and-true tradition, the stereotypical mindset and certain characteristics being associated with genders are still very much relevant in our current society. Society has indoctrinated acceptable behaviors for woman and men which has caused people to develop preconceived notions about how both genders should behave.
As literacy acquisition is a cultural process, it is important to study certain aspects of a culture that affects literacy. The way gender is viewed is an important aspect of literacy. Females and males will always be different, but culturally, our society has imprinted these differences on our youth in such a way that it marginalizes anyone that does not fall into the stereotypes society has created. Children's books frequently portray girls as acted upon rather than active . Girls are represented as sweet, naïve, conforming, and dependent, while boys are typically described as strong, adventurous, independent, and capable.
Romeo and Juliet, penned in the late 1500s, illustrates the way women were defined by their relationships with men, how they were treated as material objects to be admired and owned (the owners being husbands and fathers), and how physical beauty was the primary consideration in assessing a woman’s worth. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is another. Beyond the more obvious theme of racism, there is also a strong undercurrent of sexism as Scout struggles to navigate her desire to “act like a boy” in a society with strongly polarized and clearly defined roles for men and women. In Men and Women in Othello, from her book Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays, Carol Thomas Neely looks at the gendered behavior of the men in Othello and compares it to the women’s gendered behavior. Neely evaluates a 16th-century play in terms of seeming universal gender roles and finds the men of the play to be too concerned with male honor, their ability to dominate other men, and their control of women’s sexuality. For example, Othello believes Iago’s lies about his wife Desdemona’s chastity because Othello is too preoccupied with what other men think of him. This need to protect his honor leads him to first murder his wife and then to commit suicide. Similarly, the play’s women are too trusting of the men and refuse to see their faults clearly.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes the situation with characteristic acuity: “It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.' And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop - everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. Fiction literature has been shown to influence the beliefs and attitudes of readers of all ages.
Therefore, literature should be considered a tool for helping individuals overcome potentially damaging beliefs, such as rigid gender stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. One might argue that it is not possible to reverse the effects of years of awful and biased portrayal of genders, but literature is constantly evolving and hence can be modified to be more inclusive.
Great analysis!