Gender Roles the Effects of Essay

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The psychological burden of such an undertaking will not fail to appear. The vicinity of the Holocaust was yet another element that gave the changes in gender relationships another twist.

In the closing chapter to his book the Second World War: A Short History, Robert Alexander Clark Parker emphasized the enormous changing effects the Second World War had at all levels of society in the European countries. Entire cities and villages destroyed, family lives altered for ever, mass murder and atrocities revealed as the war approached an end, all these elements converged toward changed mentalities. Thse affected the gender relationships for good. Even if the process of women's emancipation was still slow and had many obstacles to overcome yet, it rolled like an avalanched that swept the entire Europe and the United States. The old male dominated societies were in no position to oversee women's merits during the war, as they did between the world wars. Women themselves discovered that they were able to provide for their family and for themselves, thus becoming free from the old beliefs that assigned them the limited role of wife, mother and caretaker of the household. The spiritual freedom western women gained during the Second World War placed the struggle for equal rights on the point of no return. The post war period still needed women in the active working force in Europe because the villages and cities that had been completely or partially destroyed by the heavy bombardments needed to be rebuilt. The high numbers of widows or women whose husbands had been gravely injured during the war needed to stay in the working force because they became the sole providers for their families. Even if they were willing to remarry, the men were outnumbered by women, making the process of finding a husband more difficult. From their own conviction or because they were forced to, women proved that they were capable to support a family and realizing that they were no longer dependent on their partners gave them more authority and courage to undertake tasks they believed were impossible before.

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The protagonist of Europa, the young Solly plays the role of a man who searches a new identity because he deliberately gave up his true identity, as his sole chance to survive in a world where almost his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. The whole theme of European male sexuality is illustrated through Solly's circumcision that becomes symbolic in its revelatory effects. Facing death, Solly found a solution by cutting himself completely from his roots. Moreover, the hazard made him become a Hitler's Junge and fell in love with a fanatic Nazi. Challenged by his identity crisis, Solly appears to play the role of what was portrayed at the time as the "weaker sex," while his girlfriend acts as the man in their relationship. The Second World War propaganda was made public in a culture whose patriarchal values were deeply engraved in the spirit of the masses. Women were supposed to express the same ideal of child bearers, church goers and home and husband caretakers. On the other side, although German women embraced the role the Nazi propaganda assigned them, the war forced the German society to take a break from the traditionalist views and encourage women go to work and thus fight on the home front through their own means. The fact that the war spread over a period of almost six years which enhanced the role of women on the home front, enabled them to change positions with their male counterparts and become aware of their capacities beside the famous three Ks assigned to them by the Nazi propaganda.

Perel, Solomon. Europa. John Wiley & Sons. 1999

Clarke Parker, Robert Alexander. The Second World War: A Short History. Oxford University Press, 2001

Noaks and Pridham. Nazism, 1919 -- 1945. Vol IV. The German HomeFront in World War II, pp. 360-2

Overy, R.J. The Origins of the Second World War.….....

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