KD told me that i really needed to add a couple sentences, because I was not doing a good job comparing the sources. I also wasn’t doing a good job reflecting which is a major part of this project. I still have a lot of work to do.
Author Archives: nasimmon
CRQ 2/17
Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender CRQ
Call: “Children’s developing concepts of themselves as individuals are necessarily bound up in their need to understand the expectations of the society of which they are a part.”
Response: The essay by Aaron H. Devor, Becoming Members of Society: Learing the Social Meaning of Gender, focuses heavily on the development of gender in young children. The quote that I chose from this particular essay clearly reflects that. Children seem to absorb everything they see around them, and they conform to the ideas of gender that society expects from them. Even when children were shown anatomically correct dolls, they chose the gender of the dolls simply by what they looked like on the surface. They based the gender off the dolls simply by what they looked like or the type of clothes the dolls were wearing (Rereading America 389). Early on, children understand what kind of behavior is socially acceptable for their own gender. I find this extremely interesting because it seems as if gender is not something that one is born with, but it is something that one acquires over time. After reading this essay, society seems to wholly construct the idea of what gender really is.
Question: Why is it that people follow gender roles even at early ages? Why do people feel as if they have to conform to what they are surrounded by?
Section 3: Money and Success
In Harlon Dalton’s work Horatio Alger (260), and in The New American Divide by Charles Murray (347) the similar reoccurring topics seem to be race, socio-economic status, and and cultural institutions.