Essay on The Ideal Female and the Oppression of Women

Throughout the history of society, women and men both have faced the constricting roles forced upon them, from a young age; each gender is given specific social and cultural roles to play out throughout their lives. Little girls are given dolls and kitchen toys, little boys are given dinosaurs and power tool toys, if one was to step out of this specified role, social conflict would ensue. Contrast to popular belief, sex is a biological construct, and gender is a social construct specifying the roles men and women are to follow to be accepted into society as “normal”. The effects of gender roles have had on women have proved harmful over the decades. Although the woman’s involvement in society has improved throughout the decades,

Due to the time period, one is raised in there are certain things that are considered to be the norm. In the late 1900’s women had no voice to speak out or give any of their opinions regarding any matters. In those types of society’s, the women are oppressed because the males were dominant. Edna Pontellier from The Awakening by Kate Chopin and Janie Crawford from Their eyes were watching God by Zora Neale Hurston are two women who are oppressed in the society they are brought up in.

Raina Kelley covers society's issues and cultural controversies for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.’s. In her article “Beauty Is Defined, and Not By You” aims to convince her readers that women success or not is not depends on beauty. “When I’m on m deathbed, I hope to be smiling in satisfaction about all I accomplished, not that I made it to 102 without any cellulite.” One of her goals is to remain all girls do not get influence by this society, just be brave and continue to reject that beauty is the only way to get ahead. Kelley used personal experiences, facts and examples, also counter argument to create a convincing argument.

The argument of The Beauty Myth is that as women have received more eminence, the standard of their personal appearance has also grown. Wolf’s position on the issue is that this type of social control is potentially just as restrictive as the traditional roles of women. The Beauty Myth discusses how society’s viewpoint of beauty is detrimental to women because it causes many emotional and psychological problems to women who strive to become “perfect”. This book is important due to the fact it raises awareness to the issues that many young women are currently facing.

My mother has always promoted sisterhood and support for women. Growing up, I was taught that women, although we can do anything we want to do, need a support system, because we are traditionally the underdogs, and we should not accept being treated unfairly. My mother likes to tell a story about how, when she was a girl, she told her dad that she had decided to become a lawyer when she grew up. In response to her proclamation, my grandfather, an attorney himself, asked, "Isn’t that an awfully expensive education for a girl?"

It’s difficult to envision a world where idealized female imagery is not plastered everywhere, but our present circumstance is a relatively new occurrence. Before the mass media existed, our ideas of beauty were restricted to our own communities. Until the introduction of photography in 1839, people were not exposed to real-life images of faces and bodies. Most people did not even own mirrors. Today, however, we are more obsessed with our appearance than ever before. But the concern about appearance is quite normal and understandable given society’s standards. According to Jane Kilborne, “Every period of history has had its own standards of what is and is not beautiful, and every contemporary society has its own distinctive concept of the

Freedom and equality are ideas this country has had for centuries that have evolved over time. In 1776, what Thomas Jefferson meant by “all men are created equal”, is that white males are dominant in society. Women are treated worse than men and slaves treated worse than women. People that weren’t of the “superior” race/gender of a white male were typically treated as if they were less. Women and African-Americans aren’t being treated as bad today, but they’re still being treated worse than the white males of society. Even today, when white males are typically the leaders of society, it’s not always race and gender that creates inequality; sometimes it’s money that creates the issue. Not just from past evidence, but from present

One of the most influential writers Adrienne Rich once said, “She is afraid that her own truths are not good enough.” Adrienne Rich talks about women’s role and issues in her essay called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”. She describes how women during the 1977 lied about everything. They lied about their appearance, their job, their happiness, and even about their relationship. Adrienne Rich is one of the most powerful writers, who identifies herself as lesbian feminists. Her work has been acknowledged and appreciated mainly in her poems. Throughout her decades of work as a writer-activist, Rich uses essays, speeches, and conference papers, magazine, articles book reviews, and personal reflection to articulate with

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

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

Society creates a standard of beauty for women that often changes along with society due to a new perspective on what it means to be beautiful in our culture. These standards for beauty create what our society believes makes a woman desirable, attractive, perfect, and overall beautiful.  Which then enforces unhealthy and unrealistic beauty ideals that negatively affect women's self-image and their body image because society has attributed beauty to self worth. The result is with the ever changing standards of beauty means women use various ways to alter their bodies and appearance by clothing, makeup, hair, dieting, exercising, and even taking extreme measures to perfect their looks through surgery.

Throughout history and today, we women are constant victims of stereotyping from our society. Certain “rules” have to be followed and certain “ideal” women images have to be kept. We are raised in a way to fill certain position where the society wants us to be and as a result, the opportunities are always limited for us and ideas of our importance in the society are diminishing. Even though women gained some independence, where women can work and take various position in society, the society’s idea of typical role of women never seem to change.

In the 1800’s a women was suppose to have four things Piety, Purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These principles shaped the “Cult of True Womanhood” an idea that women were to be seen but not heard. Women had no say when it came to politics, they couldn’t own property, they were not allowed to do many jobs, and they couldn’t even speak in front of men. They had the duty to be a mother and raise their children but even thought they had this responsibility it was the husband who had the complete control and guardianship of the children. Because of these ideas it was very difficult for change to happen. When women started to receive more education they began to ask questions about why they were being denied these rights, which began the

In the 21st century, many people believe that we have overcome the obstacle of gender inequality and evolved into a society of fairness and righteousness. As many know, females can be just as proficient and qualified as males at any task. Though some efforts to off-set this gender imbalance is in place, it is still commonly acknowledged that many careers are stated to be a male job such as lawyers, and female jobs such as secretaries. Gender inequality is a visible fact in our society and in this essay, I hypothesize that gender inequality still exists as a result of factors such as post-secondary education differences of the two genders, role of females in families, female objectification, career choice differences of the two genders, and

The concept of gender denotes the distinction between culturally driven and created roles of masculinity and femininity. These specific and normalized attitudes and behaviors transcend and effect how differently men and women live their lives. Based on society’s continual re-enforcement of such gender stereotypes, we see an on-going dilemma of gender inequality. Though some may argue that men experience gender inequality, this seems to exist on a much more invasive level for women. As of recently, the awareness of gender inequality in the workplace has increased. With the fight for equal pay and equal respect, society is already making strides towards the equality of women. With that being said, one aspect of gender inequality that seems