Gender Through The Ages
Analysis
When we first found out that we had the ability to choose our own topic for our final project, the first thing that came to our minds was the idea of gender stereotypes and how they presented themselves throughout an individual’s childhood, thus shaping how that individual views gender today. We set out to ask our participants how gender stereotypes were shown as they were growing up, both in their homes and at school. Our participants volunteered to answer all of our questions on film and they are all either friends or family.
Prior to making our documentary, we knew we needed to craft questions that complimented the readings we analyzed in class and continue to use articles from class to evaluate our participant’s answers as well. When writing our questions, we first reflected heavily on Emily Kane’s article, “No Way My Boys Are Going To Be Like That! Parents’ Responses To Gender Nonconformity”. This article was about how parents responded when their sons and daughters participated in gender nonconformity. Kane found through her research that parents were much more accepting when their daughters were not conforming and doing activities that were typically male but they were not as accepting when it came to their sons participating in activities that were traditionally female. A major example of this is when parents sign their daughters up for baseball (which is typically a male sport) but then get upset when their son plays with a Barbie doll (which is typically a female toy). Kane states “parents are not simply agents of gender socializations but rather actors involved in a more complex process of accomplishing gender with and for their children” (Kane, 2006, p.151–152). Kane is making the point that parents are a crucial part of how children see gender. Their reactions to certain things children do as they are growing up can be predictors for how the child views gender as they grow up. We tried to relate this article to questions about how our participants were raised by their parents or guardians and anything they remember from their childhood. The questions “Can you remember a time in school as a young child, where a male acted more feminine or a female acted more masculine?” and “Can you think of a memory that introduced you to how boys were expected to behave? How about for girls?” are two that we wanted to ask relating to the ideas of how young children did or did not conform to gender norms. We hoped that our participants would also offer up any reactions from those around them or feelings they had when seeing these nonconformities taking place. We asked the question about gendered activities based on this article as well. We added the probing question of “How did your parents respond if you weren’t interested?” based on this article because how a parent would react to a boy not being interested in football, for example, could show how they feel about their son not conforming to something that is a stereotypical gendered activity. An interesting answer we received from one of our participants is that her parents enrolled her in wrestling and karate, which are typically considered “male activities”. It turns out that our participant really liked being enrolled in these activities and said she was happy her parents did this because it made her try new things. This was an answer that we did not expect from any of our participants regardless of their age or gender. Based on our video, we found that our participants proved Kane’s claims to be true. The girl mentioned above was forced to enroll in typically male dominated sports but she also mentioned that her brothers did not have to participate in any typically female activities, such as dance. She mentioned how her parents enrolled her in these activities so her schedule would align with her brothers’ schedules, making it easier for her parents to pick up and drop off their children at their activities. Another one of our female participants talked about how her parents signed her up for sports she didn’t want to do and when she expressed her dissatisfaction her parents didn’t care and made her to stay in those sports. This further proves Kane’s point that parents are more inclined to encourage girls to participate in traditionally male activities rather than boys.
Another article that we based some of our questions and ideas on is “Gender and Society: Moral Dilemmas, Moral Strategies, and the Transformation of Gender” by Kathleen Gerson. That article talked about how traditional gender expectations are fading and women are not expected as much anymore to be fulfilled through homemaking. Instead, it is more accepted to be fulfilled through a career, hobbies, or other life events. Men were always expected to work and provide for their wife and children but now they are not expected to do that as much too. In this article, Gerson states “…the social organization of moral responsibility has expected women to seek personal development by caring for others and men to care for others by sharing the rewards of independent achievement” (Gerson, 2002, p.8). Women have traditionally been expected to be satisfied in life by the things they do for others, mainly their children and husband, whereas men were expected to be satisfied through sharing their personal achievements, for example, a raise and promotion at work, with their families. We asked people “Do you believe that there are any specific roles for women that should be followed? How about for men?”. We also asked “In your household, do you remember being assigned specific chores? If so, what were they?”. What we were searching for from these two questions was answers about how a typical household was run when our respondents were children. Based on the article, we would expect people to answer that their parents fulfilled the traditional gender roles, especially the older generations, and then the younger generations had parents who defied those gender roles. What we found is that our 84 year old participant had a mother and father who both worked full time and equally shared the home, whereas one of our 22 year old participants had a father who was the breadwinner and a mother who stayed at home. However, our 84 year old participant acknowledged that it was unusual for both her mother and father to work during that time period. Most of our other participants’ answers challenged what Gerson is saying in her article. From our video, it seems as though the participants who are younger had more of a traditional family structure where their dad went to work and their mom stayed at home to take care of them. This is why it was surprising to us that our oldest participant had a family structure that most closely resembled Gerson’s claims since these claims are supposedly happening in more recent years.
One more article that we drew on while we wrote our questions is Christel J. Manning’s article titled “Women in a Divided Church: Liberal and Conservative Catholic Women Negotiate Changing Gender Roles”. Our question, “Do you think that religion played a role in who you identify with today?” is one that we asked everyone we interview. Based on this article, we expected the answer to be “yes” for everyone. Through this article, we learned about how women might not necessarily agree with the teachings of the Catholic church but they still don’t leave. There are increasing tensions within the Catholic church between liberal and conservative Catholics about what it means to be a “good Catholic” and women’s rights and feminism are often at the center of this debate. Based on this we at least expected a response of “yes” for religion playing a role in our participants’ identities, whether they see their religion as a good or bad influence is up to the individual. We also expected those who answered “yes” to be part of the older generations, those who have been in the church for a longer period of time. To our surprise, most of our participants answered no, that religion did not play an important role, either positive or negative, in who they identify with today. Although we did not ask our participants’ why they said no, that would be something intriguing that we would like to find out if we could.
After we filmed for our video we began to edit everything together and analyze our participant’s answers. One article that came to our attention while watching the edited video was “Doing Gender” by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman. This article is about how everyday activities such as sitting, walking, or eating are gendered activities. Their main argument is that “gender is the product of social doings” (West and Zimmerman, 1987, p.129). The previously listed activities are things that have nothing to do with gender and yet we all hold each other accountable for “doing gender” while performing these activities in everyday life. We saw this specifically throughout the interviews we conducted. For example, many of the women were sitting more proper, as opposed the men, who were slouching or sitting in a more casual position. We noticed right away that the men sat the way West and Zimmerman predicted they would and the girls did too, but only to some extent. All of the women in the video did not sit with their legs crossed but they were still sitting up stick straight and were not slouched or leaning back and relaxing like the men were. Therefore, we believe that our video somewhat challenged what West and Zimmerman are saying but for the most part, proved their claims to be true: that men and women are accustomed to sitting and acting a certain way, different than one another, even when they don’t need to.
Overall, the interviewing process went extremely well. Our participants were incredibly cooperative and willing to answer all of our questions openly and honestly. We were very intrigued by the responses that were given, and after watching the documentary we wish we could go back and ask our participants more questions based on their responses. Something that stood out to us as we watched our documentary once we edited it together is that our participants’ responses were very similar to the things we talked about in class. We concluded that this is because people in our generation think very similarly and have extremely similar opinions to one another.
