In many cases, the wife was expected to run the house and provide child care. The husband would be the breadwinner and handle the financial decisions. Love was shown in part by performing duties for the family. As we discussed marriage has undergone many transformations that helped weaken the social norms that defines normal relationship ideas over the past few decades. Some examples of this are apparent with the increasing number of cohabiting relationships and the changes in both marriage and divorce rates during the 20th century.
It is shown through the characters names, for the names are often related to important political figures of the early twentieth century. Each character is symbolic of something all his or her own. Helmholtz Watson is sought to be one of the most rebellious characters in the brave new society. He has a conflict within himself but is much interested in others. Much like John B. Watson, the man known for the Little Albert Experiment, Helmholtz is curious, but much too bored with his lifestyle.
In an analysis of two works, the epic poem “Beowulf” and the more recent film that shares the title, it becomes apparent that gender stereotypes are still alive and well today. Despite showing female characters with greater active agency and different influences on male roles, the film version of “Beowulf” still succumbs to putting females in second-class roles designed to enhance the male lead. Female characters in the movie have a much greater active agency, the ability to take control of one’s life, than they do in the poem. For instance, in the film Wealhtheow[->0] obviously controls the sexual relationship in her marriage to Hrothgar, saying such things as “[he] has no sons…he never will, for all his talk” and showing open aversion every time Hrothgar suggests intimacy. In contrast, women are considered to be property of their clan or tribe first, then their husband in the original epic.
In order to deepen the conceptions of emotional self, we can categorize these conceptions into two main parts: “emotional women” and “unemotional men”. To detail, women tend to express their inner emotions such as weakness, love, sentimentality, vulnerability, envy and jealousy. On the other hand, men are not used to explain their opinions and emotions totally. For example, they tend to express their powerfulness, success, triumph and anger but not weakness, compliment and such like these frail feelings. Moreover, all these norms about women and men's emotionally
The context of Donne’s writing indicates a time that females had power despite being subordinate to men in every day life. With much tension and debate over the effectiveness of a female rule, it can also be seen as a theme within Donne’s work where the male questions his own power and submission to female dominance (Guibbory, 1990). From here, Donne seeks to re-imagine a London based on Ovid’s Rome but instead of pandering to Ovid’s obvious Christian values that underpin his work; he ignores them and rewrites the style. Still incorporating the outrageousness of Ovid, Donne uses conventional values of this discourse of desire in posing lust and desire in a way that spurs chaos and anarchy. The female persona is the catalyst of the chaos but it is from the male’s perspective that readers experience the protagonist’s anger, desire and competitive nature.
All of a sudden, the self-made man had to deal with the rising presence of women in the public sphere, a threat to traditional masculinity and, for instance, the office job as “once a male-only culture [...] invaded by newly-educated women” (Carroll 15). In order to compensate for the loss of the privilege of public space, men went into sales. With the advance of the twentieth century also the influence of women and the male desire to separate from them “in repressing any sense of passivity, vulnerability and weakness” (Taylor 60) increased. Men shifted their masculinity to their outside and the value of appearances was constantly rising: colour separation in clothing became common and men showed high interest in sports such as baseball and shaped their bodies. “National virility was tied to the physique and the proving of ones self in the arena” (Carroll 16) simultaneously excluding women from sports clubs,
Sex-role stereotypes are magnified in male-dominant firms and are harmful to women psychologically as stereotypes generate violence and gender inequality that is a form of exclusion (Forret & Dougherty, 2004). Stereotypes place women in a subordinate position to men in a patriarchal and sexist model in which their function is to serve the other and not to lead (Llopis, 2006). Men can handily adjust to male-dominated structures because they can read masculine culture better than women and because their peers are just as them. Increasing internal visibility is greatly related to the number of promotions and total compensation for men but not for women. There can be several explanations but one explanation might be that the work assignments
Considerations of inheritance in a society that constructed descent in the male line conditioned the way in which daughters, wives, and widows lived. Both religious ideology and social and economic considerations demanded, above all, virginity of daughters until marriage, or for their entire lives. The ideal of virginity had roots in the Gospels and Epistles of the Christian New Testament, in Greek Philosophy, and in patristic literature. As a patriarchal model developed for the family, where identity depended primarily on descent through the male line, and where property descended almost entirely to male heirs, the main purpose daughters served as brides, to link two lineages. (Women in the Renaissance).
During the colonial period South East Asia was very much a male dominated society. This issue was not so prevalent in pre-colonial times but as the twentieth century approached, social norms and laws became increasingly preferential towards men. For example the role of a male as the head of the household was enforced and many customary laws that had previously given women autonomy were 'reformed'. It became customary for females to be meek and, as the Victorian maxim goes, “be seen but not heard”. Women were also encouraged to increasingly rely on their husbands.
Women are under a constant pressure to adhere to roles that are specific to their gender and so are men. The woman by norm is relegated to the private domain and is allocated the affective role, while the man has full access to the public domain for he plays the role of the bread-winner. Devdutt Pattanaik, in his book, ‘The Pregnant King’, strives to show how gender plays an important part in defining roles and relationships, while at the same time also accounting for the interesting change in gender roles of men and women, which appears extremely contemporary and unthinkable at the time and context in which the story is set. Based at the time of the Mahabharata, Pattanaik’s ‘The Pregnant King’ brings forth a wide new range of ideas that are exceedingly modern in nature. These ideas question the societal norms that privilege the men and not the women, the norms that prevent both men and women from adopting occupations and indulging in activities that majorly interests them.