As a 38-year-old working single mother I am sometimes disturbed by prevailing notions of gender roles. At times the disturbance is caused by social pressure (from well-meaning family, friends, and workers as well as the general 'message' conveyed by communications media) which holds that I am, somehow, fulfilling two gender-based roles (worker and mother) that are innately conflicting in nature. Yet it truly seems that, rather than these roles being inherently related to gender, society operates in such a way as to force conflict and distinctions on people by failing to accommodate those who do not operate according to socially prescribed concepts of gender and roles. At other times the disturbance arises from my own feelings of guilt over any occasional pleasure or preference I may feel for my work role over my mothering role. Even though I consciously reject the idea that a woman intrinsically prefers her supposedly gender-related role and only accepts the other role as an economic necessity, I have somehow internalized much of the social prescription I choose to discard. Margaret Mead's theories of gender tend to confirm my rational belief that such gender-based conceptions of roles are merely social constructions. But her work also points up how strongly invested societies are in these constructs and why I have internalized ideas that seem obviously false to me.
Mead was among the first anthropologists to arrive at the conclusion, based on her field studies, that gender-based roles were not biologically determined. Her theory led to "the separation of sex from gender as sex was increasingly seen as indeterminative of gender roles," and this helped revolutionize thinking about all manner of social constructs (Visweswaran, 1997, p. 591). Mead was instrumental in the application of social-learning theory--a behaviorist theory based on the imitation of behaviors that are rewarded--to the socialization of gender roles. Soci...