Society Effects On Gender Roles In Malawi

Before the arrival of European influence, villagers of Umuofia had a single option for a way of life. It was a place to be feared, dominated by war and violent practices. Ibo culture is centered on a patriarchal system based on hierarchy; the highest titles held by male egwugwu in the legal system and the osu at the bottom. The main character, Okonkwo, represents the ambition to strive for a higher position in society in order to gain status: “His life had been ruled by a great passion-to become one of the lords of the clan” (131). Another aspect in Ibo culture is the representation of women. They are undermined in order for men to achieve success; bride prices are used to able men to marry more than one wife and husbands are

Karen Russell illustrates the theme of character development through the importance of family and culture shock in "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a short story turned into a novel series that has grown in popularity over its course of time. The story is a magic realism story that shows a vast change in character while the characters try to get used to their new lives and new culture. One of the more interesting character in this story is one called Claudette, to whom the story is being told by and seems to revolve around the most. Claudette is a young girl born into a family of werewolves, to whom send her to a school to learn how to get along with humans.

There is a division between males and females from puberty and into life. This division is most highly expressed in labor. As is typical for many societies, men hunted, fished, went to war, while females collected plants and took care of children. The subarctic people are a hunter-gatherer society. Women in this society are inferior to men. They were not treated well and often beaten by their husbands (Sutton, 87).

They spoke of other tribes where the children belong to the wives and their families. '' You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.'' This remark makes it seem that there is no 'love-making' in this culture, but only 'child-making,' in which the woman has no real role. In a description of a ceremony, ''It was clear from the way the crowd stood or sat that the ceremony was for men.

The thesis of The Body Project is that “girls today make the body into an all-consuming project in ways young women of the past did not. (Brumberg pg. xvii) This basically means that our culture has granted girls and women more freedom in how much of their bodies they can bare, and in their sexuality, that girls and young women have become more obsessed with their bodies than women of the past have.

Throughout these four days the girl had to fast, participate in physical activity, do ritual bathing, and perform women’s traditional tasks. Some traditional tasks that were passed on were the making of items such as baskets, satchels, and quill. The making of these items as well as participating in the first four days of training were thought to bring spiritual power onto the girl. Some values a girl is taught during puberty rite is to be pure, honest, truthful, virtuous, and hospitable. When a girl has been training for one year, she is approaching the end of her puberty training. She would mark a rock with red paint or mark pictographs into it to symbolize she has completed the puberty rite training. Some marks included lodges, pines, trails, and basketry that were all significantly connected to the women’s lodge. Once all of the previously stated training is complete and the help of the spirits is present, a girl will successfully enter into adulthood and she can now be a teacher of these

Women and men have very different roles in a Malian society. These different roles are displayed in the book, Sundiata. Women in this society are seen as a less important and unequal to men. The men hold more authority and higher positions. Women do not have very many rights, and are unable to have positions of power.

Consequently, this mindset, which is heavily based on tradition, prevented little girls from exploring their talents and capabilities because their fathers, brothers and sometimes even mothers decide 12 years is old enough to be women, force them to quit school and possibly even marry them off. Additionally, this form of discrimination, which is not practiced only by men but women as well, denied women certain academic opportunities. Therefore, a large number of women in those communities are hurdled from reaching their full potential and partaking in the improvement and development of our society and country.

Most of what a young boy learns about what it means to be masculine is presented to him at such an early stage that he accepts it as an inevitable truth. Often young boys can be found taunting and even motivating each other with phrases like "Don't be a (sissy) girl" or "Only girls do that." It seems that there is a pervasive fear among all males that the worst possible insult is to be labeled a female. William Betcher reports that some societies take this concept to an extreme. He talks of the initiation rites of the Sambia of New Guinea saying, "Initiation rites begin when boys are seven to ten years old and include oral ingestion of older boys' semen and painful bleeding by sticking grass reeds up the nose. The bleeding is a counterpart of menstruation and semen is ingested instead of mother's milk" (Betcher 1993). Although these actions seek to mark the boy as "not a woman", ironically they incorporate basic feminine biologic functions that men lack. <br><br>Secondary socialization then acts in the later stages of a boy's life to reaffirm society's beliefs about masculinity. As boys grow older, their bodies develop and they enter junior high and high school. At this point they begin to really understand that physical prowess and largess are the ideal. To see how this is done, we can simply look at the emphasis given to athletics versus the emphasis given to academics in public schools. Understandably, how schools emphasize athletics over academics is going to

Gender roles start to become within the scope of knowledge in the beginning of the story. They start to become evident among the villagers; even the children are guided by these social norms. Jackson illustrates this early on in the story when the boys are collecting stones for the lottery “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones” (388). By doing this, it represents the masculine nature of the boys. The idea of men doing the physical labor is manifested through the boys picking up the rocks. At the same time, the author represents the feminine nature of the girls when she stated “The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders

The ideas that have been constructed surrounding gender within Africa has severely impacted the well-being and disempowered the women and children living within this culture. Significantly less girls go to school, women earn less money than men for paid labor, harmful traditional practices affect their health, and certain cultural norms act as a hindrance to women moving ahead in society. But the larges areas of disempowerment remain in areas such as education and the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Common events such as rape, torture and violence are all detailed through the biography Go Go Mama by Sally Sara. The novel tells the story of Eugenie Muhayimana who survived the Rwandan Genocide by being forced into being a sex slave to the Hutu people but in the process contracting HIV. The inequality between men and women is extremely prevalent within the culture of Africa and as a result of this women are disempowered greatly.

Tutsis and the Hutus escalated due to a series of political events, and not only did Rwanda suffer, but surrounding countries were also affected (Lalji, 2007, p. 36). Due to the conflict, Rwandan Hutus fled into the Eastern Congo; unfortunately, some of the Hutus who fled into the Eastern Congo were a part of the Interahamwe (a Hutu rebel group) who carried out a mass killing of the Tutsis (Lalji, 2007, p. 36). Due to the support of the Rwandan and Ugandan governments Laurent Kabila, a rebel leader was promoted. In 1997, the Rwandan and Ugandan government overthrew the former government, which Mobutu Sese Seko led (Lalji, 2007, p. 36).

People often think of feminism as an issue that pertains only to women, but these people are not looking at the big picture. A large part of the inequality feminists are trying to rectify are the stereotypical gender roles the patriarchy has built for men and women, and unfortunately for a man, this may mean conforming to a sort of toxic masculinity. Not only are men expected to be emotionally shut off, they are also expected to be more inclined to anger and violence than women, and if they do meet this expectation, they are often excused of it with a simple “boys will be boys,” making it seem okay. If they happen to veer from the strong, loud, angry stereotype, they open themselves up to being seen as weak or girlish, which in this society, seems to be a horrible insult. While the danger of toxic masculinity to women is well known, the unfair standards and effects on men are often overlooked, even though they are damaging as well.

Gender roles are socially developed, ascribed and embedded into women and men, and as a result differ across cultures, communities, social classes, nations, ages and different periods of history. These include norms and values that are conditioned by the household structure and society as a whole, and women and men absorb these ascribed roles and values of the society around them. This result into learnt behaviour; specific roles and responsibilities are associated and expected from each individual. These roles and responsibilities shift over the course over time. Even though Scott (2006), who investigated the shift in family life, partially agreed the existence of some sort of change in gender role claimed to have been caused by increased secularisation and education, other authors have shown the impact of war on gender roles .

and girls when women already earn less than men in economic spheres (“Fact Sheet”, 2010). The underlying gender roles and gender inequality that persists in South Africa help not only to explain their unbelievably difficult daily burdens but it also aids in the understanding of the lack of economic and political representation of women in the region (Bentley, 2004).