Gender Roles in Children...

This is a video on gender roles in children. Its kind of mono-tone and out-of-date, but it gets the point across and its a little humorous too! I found it interesting that even at the age of two, children have a large grasp on certain gender roles.


I have a lot of cousins, most of which are around my age, however the younger ones tend to idolize the older cousins of their sex. My little cousin, Laura, idolizes me, not my brother. When she comes over she raids MY closet, wants to wear MY makeup, and wants to be just like ME, not my brother Joey. Its not that she doesn't like Joey, its because she been instilled with gender roles telling her she has to like what other women like, not men.





Kids are not brainwashed, nor are they sexist. They are simply repeating what they have observed. What this video reveals is that society determines what it means to be a male or female. SEX is determined by your genitalia at birth. GENDER is taught to you through parents, teachers, peers, media. They are two very different things. Not saying biology doesn't play a role in behavior, but gender is socially constructed and we do have to LEARN how to act.


I then thought about how we break up the chores around my house. My sister and I are in charge of doing the laundry, dishes, household cleaning, and even weeding. Where my brother does the garbage, mowing the lawn, weed-wacking. Why doesn't Joey do the laundry. Well to be honest I like my whites white not pink and destroyed, so I would never let him touch my clothes. But these stereotype have been around for thousands of years and aren't about to change...


Check the video out. I know it looks like an old after school special, but it really has some great points!
Also, let me know what you think. Do any of you disagree with what society instills in us during childhood?
DONT FEEL SHY TO COMMENT :)

Media's Influence on Body Image

Check these videos out! After our class discussion about media and how they can influence a woman's idea of  the "perfect body" I went on YouTube and did a little searching. Turns out there are hundreds of clips about women and how media is a major body image influencer. What I find particularly interesting is how they can "change" the way a women looks by a simple new invention called Photoshop. Young girls everywhere are literally starving themselves because they cant look like the beautiful and skinny models in all the magazines when in actuality no one can ever look like that, at least not without being unhealthy. The second video posted is a comparison of BEFORE and AFTER Photoshop edits. And the third is a particularly interesting one I found showing you just how easy it is for magazine editors to trim INCHES off a celebrities waist while adding two cup sizes to their bust in just minutes. Please comment! Any thoughts or inputs you guys would like to add?

Women Through the Years… (Part II)

Susan B. Anthony once said, "Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the women of today a different woman from her grandmother." How true is that? As I continue to read America’s Women – 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines I find myself amazed with every chapter. In each section the women of that day are COMPLETELY different from the generation before them. In fact, Women evolved with every new decade.

This got me thinking about my great-grandmother.

My great-grandmother, Gertrude (Busha- as we called her), was born in 1923. She was the second generation of Nezgotskis to ever live in America. She was one of four sisters, born and raised in the Polish heartland of Hamtramck, Michigan. The Roaring '20s were a time of speakeasies, short skirts, the Charleston dance, and jazz music. The 1920s also showed great strides in Women's Suffrage. There were an amazing number of cultural firsts in the 1920s, including the first talking film. She was a teen during the 1930’s when the great depression hit. My great-grandmother’s family was so poor she wore two different shoes to school and had to walk over a mile to get there.  She lived a hard childhood and women of that era didn’t have much say in the work field.

The Great Depression hit the world hard. The Nazis took advantage of this situation and were able to come to power in Germany, establish their first concentration camp, and begin a systematic persecution of Jews in Europe. In the late 1930’s she met and fell in love with her soon-to-be-husband, John. My great-grandma and her husband started their very own bar in Hamtramck. Soon after that, World War II started. My great-grandma had just had my grandma, Patricia, a few years earlier, when her husband was drafted into WWII. She was left alone to manage the bar with her brother-in-law and a few family friends.

 World War II was already underway by the time the 1940s began and it was definitely the big event of the first half of the decade. My great-grandma worked in the car factories making bombs and army utilities, trying to support her family while her husband was at war. During late hours of the night, she would work at the bar doing bookkeeping. From the stories I heard as a child, she was truly something else. My great-grandfather never returned from the war, he died in action while parachuting from a plane. My great-grandma didn’t even graduate High School; yet alone have a college degree. So, with out a husband, she sold the bar and kept numerous odd jobs; just trying to keep money in.

The 1950s are sometimes referred to as the Golden Age. Color TV was invented; the polio vaccine was discovered; Disneyland opened; and Elvis gyrated his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Cold War continued as the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union began. The 1950s also saw segregation ruled illegal in the U.S. and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. This is the era in which my grandmother, Pat was a teenager during. Her life was much more carefree and lighthearted than her mothers. She was the first to graduate High School. She met and married my grandfather, Ed, quickly after graduating and it was still custom to be a housewife and so like most women of her age, she stayed home to be a stay-at-home mom.

To many, the 1960s can be summed up as the Vietnam War, hippies, drugs, protests, and rock and roll. (A common joke goes "If you remember the sixties, you weren't there.") Although those were important aspects of this decade, other events occurred as well. For instance, the Berlin Wall was built, the Soviets launched the first man into space, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Beatles become popular, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his "I Have a Dream" speech, and so much more! This was the era in which my parents were born. My grandma, Pat, had three children, my father, Joe, being the oldest.

My grandpa Ed divorced my grandma when my father was an early teen; she had no other option but to go to college. She was a single parent who raised three kids and with some support from my grandpa Ed she eventually got her degree in Nursing. My parents mainly grew up in the 1970’s. The Vietnam War was still a major event in the beginning of the 1970s and 1980’s.  The 1980s saw the introduction of the mesmerizing Rubik's Cube toy, Pac-Man video game, and Michael Jackson's Thriller video. This started the beginning of the “electronic era” that hit when I was born. My mom didn’t have the luxuries of life as I do. Her parents owned their own business, and my mom was left to help out around the house a lot.

She helped cook, clean, and do more household chores than the children of my generation. When she graduated High School, she started dating my father, and I’m proud to say that she is the first woman on her side of the family to ever go to college. She became an occupational therapist and my father graduated with masters in civil engineering. My parents have been blessed to be a well off upper-middle class family and have given me the opportunity to go to college as well, something my great-grandmother never would never even think about.

To me, it’s crazy to look back at the past generation of women in my family. Each generation of women has a COMPLETELY different life from the next. What will my daughter’s life be like? And what opportunities will come for women in the future? I’ll guess we’ll just have to wait and see!

We Can Do It!

We all recognize the face.... but who was she? I was online last week and came across a very interesting article. I thought you might enjoy it….

"Does anyone know who the woman shown in it was? Sad that we had to wait for her obituary to appear in today’s New York Times to find out… but here it is;

Geraldine Doyle, Iconic Face of World War II, Dies at 86 

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who was believed to be the unwitting model for the "We can do it!" poster of a woman flexing her biceps in a factory during World War II — an image that later became a symbol for the American feminist movement — died on Sunday in Lansing, Mich. She was 86.

The cause was complications of arthritis, said her daughter Stephanie Gregg.

Mrs. Doyle was unaware of the poster’s existence until 1982, when, while thumbing through a magazine, she saw a photograph of it and recognized herself. Her daughter said that the face on the poster was her mother’s, but that the muscles were not.

“She didn’t have big, muscular arms,” Mrs. Gregg said. “She was 5-foot-10 and very slender. She was a glamour girl. The arched eyebrows, the beautiful lips, the shape of the face — that’s her.”

In 1942, when she was 17, Geraldine Hoff took a job as a metal presser at a factory near her home in Inkster, Mich., near Detroit, to aid the war effort, Mrs. Gregg said. One day, a United Press photographer came in to shoot images of working women.

The resulting poster was used in a Westinghouse Company campaign to deter strikes and absenteeism. It was not widely seen until the early 1980s, when it was embraced by feminists.

She quit the factory job after about two weeks because she learned that another woman had damaged her hands while using the metal presser, and she feared that such an injury would prevent her from playing the cello, her daughter said.

At one of her next jobs, at a soda fountain, she met her husband, Leo H. Doyle, a dental student. They had been married for 66 years when he died this year.

In addition to Mrs. Gregg, she is survived by four other children, 18 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren."

Quoted From: http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/12/ 

Women Through the Years...

America’s Women – 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines.

So, I just finished reading the reading assignment for Women in America and it was really good. So good, that I continued reading well into the next chapter. I was actually surprised at the fact that I enjoyed it and even more surprised with what I read. At first it seemed as if women were really struggling. In the colonies, times were tough, and the women did just as much as them men (if not more) and got no credit for it. They couldn’t own land, get a divorce, or even defend themselves in the court of law. They died very young, often before their children reached ten. However, as time went on, and by the second generation of women colonist, I felt like they learned how to “work the system.” Some learned it was better not to marry in order to own their own land and some even owned their own businesses. Others just learned the system of marriage. Women would marry sometimes up to 4 or 5 different men in their lifetime. Every time a husband would die, they would inherit all his wealth and quickly move on to the next one. It was a little unconventional but I worked for them!