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Family Values and Gender Roles Essay

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Family Values and Gender Roles

Family is the basis of life and is a basis for what a person learns as they grow into adulthood. Family Values are what your family teaches you. Family is similar to school in the fact that your family teaches you about the world and how every human interacts with others. Gender Roles are the hierarchical basis of a family; the father is the bread winner, mother makes sure dinner is on the table at eight p.m., and the children are straight A students and incredibly popular. I believe that gender roles are not influenced by family values; I believe gender roles are nothing but prejudices under a different name.

Gender roles seek to put a person into a mold of what someone …show more content…

When a person does not fit the mold, they are considered bad, tainted, and are unaccepted. For example, in "Keep Within Compass," the woman that does not follow the ideal ways will fall into disgrace; "Working as a domestic tavern worker, selling in the street, and prostituting herself to soldiers. (220)" This is not true in any sense of the idea. Just because a woman cannot walk and sew at the same time is no reason to assume she is a bad person. In this way, family values and gender roles are as different as men and women.

I believe that family values are necessary in life but have nothing to do with gender roles. Gender roles predate the family values of today. In today's world, the stereotypical family gender roles have become blurred due to homosexuality, divorce, and the ever present, single parent household. The gender roles of today give people reason to fear and dislike those that do not fit their ideas of a stereotypical gender role. No family value will change the way a person thinks of someone who does not fit the stereotypical gender role.

Gender roles are similar to prejudices because no one is perfect and it is like trying to guess a child's potential when the child is still in womb. For example, saying a woman will be a whore or a bad mother, because she does not fit the gender role placed

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