In her article, “Americans Have a Different Attitude”, the author Yen Le Espiritu presents the issue of immigrant groups, such as the Filipinos as viewing the United States as in immoral and untraditional state that has lost sense of it’s moral values. The author begins narrating the responses she got from interviews she conducted within the Filipino community, located in San Diego, California. Many of these Filipino homes live their lives through the scope of “the Filipino Way”, which unlike Americans, means that they value their families, hard work, commitment, marriage and purity through sexual desires. Yen Le explains her findings and continue explaining how there were commonly found notions of social ideals and harsh judgement against the American individual lifestyle …show more content…
However, I feel I can relate a bit to this article. I come from a christian home and have a mixed heritage between Mexican and Cuban culture. Both of these cultures systematically oppress the female group into this typical, household wife, that needs to stay inside the home, cook dinner, prepare the meals for this husband and basically become submissive to her counterpart. Girls had to dress a certain way, they were strictly forbidden to have sex outside of marriage or face the harsh harassment from other people, they have curfews as compared to the guys, they couldn’t be late out at night, they had to do all domestic work, and could never be alone with boys or else they were considered a “cualquiera”, which translates to slut. As a male, I feel too many burdens have been given to women in securing the family’s legacy and reputation. I strongly feel that men should also be taken into consideration, not just women. Men also lose their virginity and parents also need to be a bit more stricter on the males. If not that, then it isn’t fair for just the women to have limited decisions in their
Espiritu’s interviews with almost one hundred Filipino Americans searches how gender factors into minority understandings of whiteness and their own personal, cultural identity. Filipino immigrant families stress cultural superiority over white Americans by declaring that their daughters have higher moral standards. They believe they have greater values when it comes to family commitment and sexuality. Also, Filipinos felt their culture was superior to white American culture because their lives revolved around their close-knit families while white families were seen as detached or individualistic. The responsibility for maintaining family ties and cultural traditions was put on Filipino women, which usually falls on women of all cultures. Carrying out responsibility reinforces patriarchy among Filipinos. Nearly all cultures blend” proper” femininity with sexual
In the novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Juniot Diaz you start to notice a cultural gender role and how there is certain expectations of them. The novel is based on a young boy named Oscar Wao and the hardships that one event has caused to an entire family. Even though the novel is focused on Oscar the author always went back to his sister and his mother. The author described the women as “real, strong women, even though they were being filtered through a somewhat distorted male point of view” (Stevenson 1). These two women play an important roll in this novel, they ultimately don't show the cultural gender role and what is expected from them. All the important female rolls in Oscars life are independent and strong women but they all have one thing in common, being mistreated by men.
Woman have a lot to consider in their everyday lives. Although bringing a child into the world can be a beautiful thing, women should have the right to choose if they are ready for that commitment and if they want to bare any children at all. In some countries these are freedoms that women do not have. When reading about genders, it was sad to read about “honor killings”. Honor killings typically involve male family members killing a female family member who caused shame or disgrace to the family. The female could be a victim of rape and
Peter Marin’s article “Toward Something American: The Immigrant Soul” explains his views on American life versus American culture and how they differ. He explains that in the average American life it is simply the task of finding and calling the place they now reside in home. “Home is for us, as it is for all immigrants, something to be regained, created, discovered, or mourned-not where we are in time or space, but where we dream of being”. (84) In other words, a new immigrant coming to America and a descendent to new world immigrant still experience the same conflict of American life. In the
n the text reading Delinquent Daughters: “Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States” Author Mary Odom states raising the age of sexual consent in the U.S. increased the number of people prosecuted for statutory rape among consenting teenagers. Laws Predicated on the backs of the immigrants, native Blacks, and Mexican workers who had consensual sex with the daughters of the white middle class or Working-class minorities under a Patriarchal rule. Odom states due to differences in the middle and working class sexual expression, too (avoid generalizing), Odom says the differences in the sexual expression of the middle class which operated within a patriarchal moral code, and the immigrant and working-class communities, who were more concerned with female chastity. (“Patriarchal structures of the preindustrial societies, diverse religious tradition, and codes of honor that associated family reputation with the morality of wives and daughters.” Odom states that in the United States fathers/men controlled both the workforce, labor and the “sexual lives of their wives’ children and servants in ways that supported the family economy” (p.43). One threat to Patriarchal control “was the out of wedlock birth” (p.44) Thus premarital chastity was influenced by religion and men and therefore, was highly regarded. Premarital sex was considered sinful, and the double standard of sexual roles was at work as “sexual promiscuity would destroy a woman’s honor, while
Men were able to do just about anything they wanted with their wives, until the women's movement and even then in some parts of the countries it is still the same. "Prior to the Civil War married women had many duties but few rights. They were not permitted to control their property, even when it was theirs by inheritance. A husband had the right to his wife's wages, to decide on the education and religion of their children, and to punish his wife if she displeased him." (Janice M. Steil). In addition, it shows how men always over rule women. Naomi Wolf also talks about how women were not treated as human. For example, she says, "In the nineteenth century, when a judge ruled that a husband could not imprison and rape his wife, the London Times bemoaned." Also, she mentions the English common law that said, a man could legally beat his wife with a switch "no thicker than his thumb", and that's where she says we got the phrase "rule over thumb." It seems incredible to me that they treated women that way. What most feminists want is the marriage where their partner is showing respectful treatment towards them and their children, a kindness rather than a legal right such as before or in other countries today. Therefore, All the rules that men laid down over the centuries have recently gone out the window, and we're
Because of the opposing cultures and ideas that collide in the mind of Richard Rodriguez, his arguments tend to break boundaries of traditional philosophical writing. As a Catholic, a homosexual, a Mexican immigrant, and an intellectual, the meaning of family values can differ significantly from one aspect of his life to the next. By gathering input from each of those sectors, Rodriguez composes an array of personal anecdotes and hypothetical examples in “Family Values,” to profess his theory that Americans’ supposed beliefs do not always align with reality. With the use of generalization and paradoxical exemplification, Rodriguez is able to portray
In 1848 women around the world came together to form what we call a women’s revolution. Women decided to step and say how much they know they deserve the same rights as men. We are all equal, no matter what our gender is. We are all born with rights that aren’t able to be taken away and those come with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If the government sees someone being untreated by these rights, they are meant to do something about it. They are meant to annihilate the persons causing the unjust treatment. But instead they have not. We have this mistake of redoing past history and this is just the same. It shouldn’t be okay for a man to own a woman in any way, or affect what she does and how she does it. He, referring to the male, has made her have no voice. She’s voiceless in front of the man and not just her husband, but any male. You’ve taken away women’s rights to give them to less intelligent and more ignorant men? That does not make sense, when the woman can be just as smart, if not smarter. She has no representation. If married, which is supposed to be a glorious thing, she is in the eyes of the law non-existent and in the eyes of marriage her husband is her master instead of a husband. Him being the master justifies him to take away her rights and it is okay. She can in the eyes of her husband commit crime and its okay, she cannot own property, she cannot make as much money as the man can if any at all.
In the essay, “Family Values,” Richard Rodriguez discusses the topic of family values as it relates to immigration and his own homosexuality. Rodriguez
Throughout history, humans have always had a system the dictated the way men and women are supposed to act. These gender roles define society and if you do not act upon these terms, now anyway, no one really cares. We have learned to become tolerant of those who are different, however, back when religion played a major role in the world, and everyone judged everyone by the way they acted, going against these norms would mean excommunication. Not only from the church but from society itself. These gender roles though have been challenged by people that want to do more. In “The Third Generation” a girl tells the story of her family and how women should change the way things are done. She watches her family struggle because they followed the norm
I can also feel the rigid gender roles and norms in the Mexican American culture. In Movimientos de rebeldia y las culturas que traicionan, Anzaldua mentions that the Mexican culture barely accepts deviant behaviors. Their culture expects women to be commitment to men and if they are not, they are labeled as a selfish. Women are valued as a wife and mother, and “women are made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have children.” Because of fear of being unaccepted and abandoned by their own culture, “some conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows.” The Mexican women fight for women’s rights in their mother culture first, before they fight against the racism or sexism in white dominant culture.
They initially came through Hawaii and then migrated into California in the 1920-1929 (McKibben, PPT, 2016). When they first arrived in California they had to deal with the exclusion acts happening at the time, which were described previously. However, the Filipinos established cultural communities in San Jose and Stockton, California with the combination of assimilation and nationalism. These communities adapted to American norms while maintaining and embracing their cultural values. One of their more important cultural value regarded gender roles and women’s’ place in society. In fact, “Filipinas played a critical and central role in constructing the rich and dynamic ethnic community and distinctive Filipina/o American culture and identity in Stockton. Changing perceptions of women's roles in the Philippines and the United States, the extreme imbalance in the sex ratio, the lack of elders who would uphold traditional views, the large number of interracial and interethnic families in Stockton, and the entry of Filipinas into the wage labor market created a situation in which Filipinas/os could reshape and transform ideas about gender, femininity, and family in Stockton (Mabalon, Little Manila is in the Heart, 153).” Essentially, Filipinos helped to shift the social ideal of a women’s place in
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the way women have been represented and characterized gives us an idea of how the female gender are treated differently from the male gender as well as children in Latin America during the 1950s. The husbands were given all the authority, also known as machismo, whereas women weren’t allowed to take charge of anything, and were portrayed as weak and impotent.
Throughout many decades women have been struggling to be equal to men, both at home and in the work place. Women have come a long way and are certainly fighting to gain that equality, but gender roles are very important in our society. They have become important in life from birth, and society continues to push these gender roles. The treatment of the male gender is very different from that of the female, and this issue has become very important to me, as a woman. As children we learn and adapt to specific gender roles, and as we grow they become more evident and more important to our role in a society. There is a lot of discrimination against the female gender. Carol Gilligan argued that
During the 19th century, women were controlled by a male dominated society. The women were in pure agony knowing that there was no faith for them to have a crucial change in civilization. This could often lead to “clinical depression” in which a human could feel lonely, empty, confounded and miserable. In this time period, women’s role in society was to be simply mothers and wives. A world where women had rights, control, and power was a fantasy. According to Hall, he states, “Key to all feminist methodologies is the belief that patriarchal oppression of women through history has been profound and multifaceted” (Hall 202). In other words, it is known that the male takes complete cruel supremacy over the years in our history. In The