Gender Roles Shaped by Family and the Church

A humorous comment on how gender roles can be shaped from an early age within the family and also within the Church.

-Audi A.

With More Equity, More Sweat

I came across this article and I wanted to share it with everyone. It talks about the workplace and how changing gender roles have affected love and marriage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/gender/gender22a.htm


Kara S.

Identifying Our Assumptions - Ben Rieder

Although my parents weren’t exactly shoving gender roles down my throat throughout my early childhood, I still learned what the norms were almost inherently. The division between boys and girls is engrained in us not just by parents, but teachers, pastors, friends and the media. Obviously many misguided views of gender roles begin in the home, but gender cultivation is perhaps worst in schools and churches and further cemented by what we see in television and movies.

Many people ignore this and choose to pretend that there are no problems with gender roles. I believe this is changing in my generation, however. There was a time when the vast majority of our country agreed that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. In retrospect this is unbelievable, but more so unbelievable to my generation than any other. As a generation that has grown up without the inequality our parents and grandparents had, we have the chance to make a real difference and ensure that future generations don’t have to experience the gender issues that we currently face today.

And though I do feel that we are headed towards a brighter tomorrow, we are far from there. Issues of African American’s rights became women’s rights and that became homosexual’s rights and that will become a struggle for someone else’s rights in the future. There is a cycle of inequality, but that cycle also shows that equality will happen. The best we can do is raise awareness, make invisible gender norms visible and treat people with respect.