Sexist Stereotypes Of Men And Women

In The Things We Carried, We learned that men are not the only one’s that have part of the war but, also that women are part of the war as well. Have you ever thought that you as a women ever wanted to be part of the war? To want everyone in the world believe that a women can also be apart of the war? Well to demonstrate to you there are three young courageous women in The Things They Carried, that want us women to become apart of the war. Back in the 1950’s women had rights to be in the war and to help take care of men that were wounded severely.

This chapter covers the transition of Mary Anne Bell, of how she changed from being a normal, sweet teenage girl to being one of the Green Berets, filled with enthusiasm for the war and intrigued with the culture of Vietnam. This message is about how the innocence of women is consumed by the war and how once they begin to learn more about it, they are hopelessly entranced by it, far from returning to their usual selves. Rat talks about how, “Anne made you think about those girls back home, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try and tell them about it, they’ll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip.”(O’Brien 108), and this shows that women won’t understand what Vietnam really is like, they have to experience it themselves. Women also won’t understand the grueling mental pain that soldiers experience in the war.

Through the war effort, women solidified their place in society as capable and responsible citizens by working jobs they had never worked before, managing finances and other aspects of home life, and entering the war as soldiers who helped wage against the Axis powers. Women proved for the first time that they were more than just housewives who could sometimes work in factories when the nation was in trouble. General Eisenhower said that “The contribution of the women of America, whether on the farm or in the factory or in uniform, to D-Day was a sine qua non (essential part) of the invasion effort”.1 Some of these women even served as nurses on the front lines and lost their lives defending our soldiers.

The importance of gender equality is not thoroughly acknowledged in a battlefield containing harsh conditions and may lead to death, as the male gender is seen as a better fit in warfare than the female gender. This has been a repertory opinion of the genders throughout history. War is particularly critical of women for supposedly being weaker and less intelligent than men as if women lack the ability to cope with war. Women may generally be seen on the sidelines of war, helping out the injured, but never caught up in the midst of combat. It is thought to be rare to find women interested in warfare. These are the opinions from the medics, who are men, in the short story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” by Tim O’Brien. The short story begins

The Vietnam War was a perplexing, unjustified conflict where both historians and the media over-generalized service members’ experiences. They constantly failed to speak for all people with firsthand combat experience and focused solely on the male’s perspective. Lynda Van Devanter, a former member of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (ANC) and Vietnam veteran was the first woman who educated America on the female’s position during the Vietnam War and systematically destroyed the stereotype of an undamaged, inessential Vietnam nurse. Contrary to popular belief, the Vietnam War distorted the mentality of both men and women who served overseas, according to Devanter. Historians and the media, rather than acknowledging the Vietnam Nurses’ distinct perspective as a key element of the morally ambiguous altercation, they focused solely on male veteran experiences and failed to accurately portray the war. By changing the subject of Vietnam War stories through her forthright memoir, Home Before Morning, Devanter wrote about the fallacious stereotypes nurses

Cynthia Enloe’s book titled Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War allows readers to enter the lives of eight women; four American and four Iraqi, in order to better understand the everyday lives of people, their struggles, and the outcomes of war by using particular stories of women to bring together issues present globally. Enloe wrote this book to analyze war from a feminist perspective. Analyzing war through a feminist lens by way of stories makes understanding the war more accessible for wider audiences (Enloe 2010:xii and 218). The use of stories allows for a better understanding of women in both countries and shows that there is no one group of women, whether that be American or Iraqi, there is no monolithic Muslim women or American women (Enloe 2010:xii). In doing so, Enloe (2010) allows for readers of all backgrounds to critically question the gendered aspects of war including the histories, feelings, struggles, and the ways in which women organize and resist war waging (p. xii). Enloe (2010) in both her purpose for writing this book and in the title, does not focus on one group of women which allows for a more serious and balanced engagement with the women in both countries. Enloe connects stories of women from two countries while at war. When women are taken seriously in all of their diversity, and their ideas and actions are explored, the world will better understand how upholding certain forms of masculinity at particular moments in time

Emphasized Femininity During World War II World War II was considered a start for women’s liberation. On the surface, it appears so; women entered the work force in large numbers and performed tasks previously considered masculine. This is just face value, when looking deeper, it is clear that women entered the labour force not because of a right to work or a struggle for gender equity but for the war effort. Supposed gains were lost at the end of the war because the attitude towards women’s role in society had not become more egalitarian. In fact, gender roles were even more strictly enforced.

The women during the Vietnam War have been mostly forgotten because of the attention that has been given to the men’s military recognitions. However, women have always played a part with the terrifying and bloody war. According to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, more than 11,000 military women were stationed in Vietnam during the conflict. Also, Independent surveys estimates that the number of women, both civilian and non-civilian was between 33,000 and 55,000 (Carlson). Despite these high numbers of women in military, they however, struggled to attain equality. The great efforts that the women have done as nurses and entertainers for the soldiers were mostly ignored and discredited.

Throughout chapters 2 and 3 of Beyond Combat, the role of women having a pivotal role in the Vietnam War has mostly been characterized as what the American media called women as either “donut dollies” or “girl next door” within the Red Cross Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas (SROA) program in comparison to Vietnamese women as sexualized and sometimes dangerous. To me the content in chapter 2 represented a domestic ideal that was rejected by American women when they made the decision to escape from both marriage and being dutiful to the family as well as potential crossing racial boundaries; whereas in chapter 3 it revealed and reinforced how the concept of American military women was challenged in regards to basic assumption about

The army and the WAC (Women’s Army Corps) depicted women’s service to the military as an “extension of their work in the home and in the war industries.” There were represented as guarding moral values, virtues, and home

Helen Thorpe’s novel Soldier Girls weaves together the tales of three women, Michelle Fischer, Debbie Helton, and Desma Brooks, in the Indiana National Guard who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Although quite an age difference exists between these three women and each holds opposing political views, they come together to be close friends in the end. These soldiers from the Indiana National Guard – one an eighteen-year-old struggling college student, one a single mom of three, and one a lively forty-one-year-old beauty salon manager – never imagined that they would serve in war. The story demonstrates their life-changing experiences while serving in the military and how that affected their personal lives and family relationships. Besides being united under the same gender, these three women are also connected by their socioeconomic class. Michelle, Debbie, and Desma had no patriotic intention to enlist, but the monetary benefit convinced them to make this life-changing decision. Belonging to the lower income working class, these women could not help but think that a couple extra thousand dollars could substantially assist their household. Citizens, especially those from the bottom of the social hierarchy chain, join the service not from a sense of duty but as a job. Michelle, Debbie, and Desma overlooked their fears over the economic incentives. Historically, mostly men served in the military as they possessed the quality to be courageous and warrior-like. But in recent

Post-war the men returned, and they took their jobs back. “The strange paradox that, despite expanding job roles, attitudes towards women remained largely unchanged, and at the war’s end, the government propaganda which had stressed patriotic duty in getting women out to work, now did the same to get them back into the home,” showed the returning roles of the Cult of Domesticity imposed on women (Wynn 475). Grandma felt as though she had no choice but to adapt to the post-war changes because she hadn’t gotten any further schooling than a high school diploma. Lack of education and manipulation to maintain U.S. patriotic duties created disenfranchised women. The government sold the idea that “total war required total commitment . . . it demands that all of the nation’s resources be committed to victory – and that means women as much as it does jet fuel,” and I believe my Grandmother would agree with that statement because post-war ideology wasn’t about what was right or wrong for women, but that together they had worked hand and hand to win the war (STEWART 26). Defining these actions as “patriotic” was the U.S. Military’s way of covering up the unfair oppression of women in the workforce and the U.S. Military efforts to put women back into the homes through new uses of propaganda similar the ideals defined in The Cult of Domesticity. American patriotism

On August 18th, 1920 Congress had ratified the 19th amendment which granted women the right to vote. This was just the first step in the women’s fight for equality. Even to this day, women are constantly working and trying to prove they are not inferior to men. The bias against women which believes women should do the housework while men go out and make money, severely affected the inferiority of women. Only in the last forty years have women been attending college in the United States at the same rate men have. Women are constantly behind men which leaves people to believe they are not as strong and able.

The film The Trojan Women is an anti-war film not only condemning the emotional and societal affects of war in general, but also focusing on the effects of such conflicts upon women in particular. This focus allows the story to be more universally relevant, particularly so to the mothers, wives, and daughters who watched the men in their lives being called to serve in the Vietnam War, and subsequently watched the harrowing television coverage of hundreds of body bag being shipped back home.

War, a word that often describes the aftermath of a disagreement tends to often become a topic of conversation amongst Americans today. Since the founding of our fathers we have faced ample amounts of conflict. Justice amongst these circumstances is not easy to reach, sacrifices had been made and will continue to until the conclusion is met. While their loved ones are away, the families of the fighting soldiers face daily obstacles. These sacrifices often become overlooked and taken for granted. Women have always played an important role in the success of family life and the well being of our country under these circumstances; through the years, these tasks have ranged from work on the assembly lines to performing seamstress duties for a soldier’s uniform. Without this unwarranted support, we’d be at a loss during these disheartening times.