Gender Over the Course of Term Paper

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Without their guidance, the world be empty of the poetry of Maya Angelou, the courage of Clara Barton, the genius of Pearl S. Buck, the leadership of Rosalynn Carter, the great voice of Ella, and the practical inventions of Temple Grandin. Though not warmly received across the board at first, the movement changed history.

Society derives its gender roles from the religious doctrines it holds sacred; it is also important to note the anthropological perspectives which, frequently false, have also been factored into the social consciousness of a culture over time. Among these in the world of gender definitions are the ideas of Darwin, whose plebian social scope promoted an idea in which the best genes were transferred to males over females, programming men psychologically to be the better species. Fortunately, the age of social Darwinism that separated whites from their inferior racial peers has also brought the end to such a seemingly obvious theoretical choke.

While the intellectually stunting and recreationally infuriating chores of household and familial responsibility were deemed below men, women were forced into the natural demands of the day. As the "useless" sex, they were locked into their kitchens. Some religious doctrines, like that of Hassidic Judaism and most Protestant movements, recognize the role of the woman - even in her role as mother - as something more important than Darwin's culturally indentured servant. Despite its strict Sharia, Islam even recognized woman to be more worthy than Darwin's ideas purported by affirming the power of the home, even if not the power of women. Having the kitchen far more exalted, a certain respect befell the woman by proxy.

For most women, though, such social pittance remains not enough; the powerful forces of feminism continue to guide confused fathers and great males through the maze that is home-and-job life, and women continue to weigh the power of their educations, circadian clocks and urge for children, as well as the still-shut workplace in which they might find professional success with conviction.
In a world where they were forced to tend to children and then to machinery as the World Wars took the men overseas, women have been exposed to greater movements than just feminism; they have been given the gift of great social exposure and the power to push feminism through the boundaries of equal vote and to real egalitarianism; universal childcare, paternity leave, and the destruction of the systematic ideas that still, in many ways, keep them tied to the kitchen while they excel outside of it as well.

In my personal opinion, neither gender has it harder than the other; both are faced with a vast web of complex decisions, social expectations, and personal goals that mix to form a largely equal role in the ever-present gender caste system still at play. Women who choose to take care of a household today are gaining more recognition for the power of their work; in Venezuela, they even receive social security and insurance from the national government as compensation for their work. While women can now join men at the round table in conference to discuss the social future of the world, and men can also arrive with the child's cheerios still stuck to his shirt that once only a woman would have tended to, the true road to social equality is only now being born: the weight is not upon the genders, and which is more important or how they are equal, but instead how the demands of the day - both social rearing and childcare as well as professional attainment - are equal in their own rights, equally important despite the gender or individual choosing to do them.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. New York: Cornell University Press, 2002. p. 13.

Freedman, Estelle. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Introduction.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New.....

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