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In Tenth Grade, Right Before I Was About To Take A Group

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In tenth grade, right before I was about to take a group quiz with three boys in my Algebra II class, I felt the need to ask the question “how much time do we have?” My teacher laughed and replied “You have the whole class period but Mackenna, we all know you’ll be done with the test and finishing up curing cancer before the boys complete question one.” All my life, I’ve been identified as an intelligent person and a strong, assertive leader. I never really thought about where those attributes of myself came from until considering structure and agency. After pondering the notion deeper, I realize that the bulk of my status as a smart woman came from the structures found in my family––particularly my mother’s matriarchal role. However, the …show more content…

In that regard, it could be argued she became the matriarch based on “the character of the leader” (Golding lecture), fulfilling the charismatic leader ideal type. However, it’s hard to say she didn’t garner some of my respect because she represented a traditional, “well-established form of power” (Golding lecture): parental. I was born knowing I needed to respect my parents because it was a social fact: parents respect their children. However, based on the patriarchal society in which we live, I should thus respect my father’s power because the structure I live in would teach me that. Yet, I grew up knowing my mother is the powerhouse in the family. Thus, my mother the matriarch, lies somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram of Weber’s three ideal power types.
Even though I grew up in a family where my mother was not the traditional homemaker and my family never pressures me to want children, I still feel the pressure to become a mother and a homemaker. On a microcosmic level, in my family structure, my mom splits her time between work and being a homemaker. She works at an office in Phoenix two days a week and then works from home the other three. Originally, she decided to work in this fashion when my brothers and I were all in elementary school and we couldn’t afford after school care or a babysitter five days a way. Thus, the socioeconomic pressures and social fact that children

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