Gender Roles in Various Cultures

The idea of societies organized around agriculture associated with the female principle out of societies characterized by hunter-gatherer food collection associated with male behavior, seems to have shaped the history and perception of the civilizing functions around engendered biophysical configurations (Rasmussen & Mellanby, 2000). No theory of social structure in the modern period, however, is complete without attention to socially determined functions of males and females, only apparently attributable to their biological makeup. Though Goffman (1977) says there are few meaningful differences gender biology in the industrial nations, he adds that social roles and norms are much more forcefully felt than those attributable to biological difference, and that women feel them most strongly. Indeed, across cultures, women's roles are a construction of the society, which is male dominated, male-constructed. Thus women's fate is attached to the fate and/or prerogatives of the men in their lives (Goffman, 1977). Such trends vary in intensity and emphasis, and how variations manifest is the project to which this re

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eness of family life, shaped by hierarchically determined values and priorities, is a significant attribute of Mexican-American society across social classes and irrespective of whether both parents have jobs. Citing the importance of family solidarity to the culture, Madsen (1973, pp. 46-7) presents examples from families that demonstrate tension between individual development and hierarchical presumptions about family. Children are at the bottom and are expected to show respect and unquestioning obedience to both parents and grandparents in general and to their father in particular, as well as to those included in the extended family such as baptismal godparents, in the tradition of "compadrazgo or coparenthood. Compadres (coparents) are sponsors who assume carefully defined roles . . . linked by tradition through interlocking obligations of mutual aid and respect" (Madsen, pp. 48-9). Madsen connects the tradition of a man's "supremacy . . . within his own home" (p. 50) to the hard social reality that Mexican-American men must be subservient on the job or in society. Children are "angelitos," or innocents "as yet uncontaminated by sin and error" (p. 53), but they must absorb cultural cues as life lessons. Mothers have the role
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Approximate Word count = 1990
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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