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gender diffs. Gender Roles in Children’s Books: An Examination of Little
House in the Big Woods and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer ...
Submitted by lgruenebaum on April 5, 2005
Category: Book Reports
Words: 1839 | Pages: 8
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Gender Roles in Children’s Books: An Examination of Little House in the Big Woods and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
People use several different classification systems to help organize a complex society. For example, scientists use a system composed of hierarchies in order to place animals in their proper kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. By creating this classification system, people of society are better able to understand the relationships that these animals have with each other. Just as scientists use this hierarchy to organize animals, people use the concept of gender to classify their own kind. However, many people fail to realize that gender, unlike the system of hierarchies used by scientists to classify animals, is not biologically based. While sex is a biological concept, gender can be defined as the sociological, psychological, and cultural attributes that society associates with sex. Thus, society creates gender roles, and, accordingly, “does gender.” In other words, people require that others act out the gender roles set by society if they want to be part of the social norm. The purpose of this paper, then, is to first examine literature which discusses ways in which society “does gender”, and then examine the manner in which authors of children’s books promote these gender roles that society has assigned.
Judith Lorber’s article entitled, “Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender” (as qtd. in Ferguson, 2005) is one example of a piece of literature that examines “doing gender.” In this article, she argues that the concept of gender exists because of socialization; that is, society teaches that certain characteristics should be associated with boys while other characteristics should be associated with girls. As aforementioned, in order to demonstrate why society uses gender classifications from birth, Lorber says that people must look at gender as a social institution in that “gender...
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