Women's Studies

The social construction of gender begins at a very young age for most people. Anke Ehrhardt and John Money’s novel, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, as well as Margaret Andersen’s Thinking About Women, discuss the many things that shape people into two different and distinct sexes. From the minute one is born, one is presented with a gender-specific name, clothing, and toys; and that is only the beginning. The social construction of gender is the process by which the expectations of being a girl or a boy are formed and how they are passed on through society. The social construction basically gives a prescription for how to be either gender; it molds us to be either a boy or a girl. The ways by which gender is socially constructed come from one’s parents, peers, schools, religious organizations, and other institutions of society.

One main difference between men and women are obviously the biological differences. However, biological differences should only establish the male and female sex roles, not necessarily gender roles. Men have penises. Men have the ability to have sex with tons of women everyday (although in most cultures that does not exactly happen) and will not get pregnant. Having sex with many women every day will not slow a man down, sexually. This makes males the “fast sex.” Women, though, can get pregnant after even having sex once. This slows women down enormously, in that a woman will be out of the mating pool for typically three to five yearsвЂ"from the time she’s pregnant until the time she is done nursing. This labels females the “slow sex,” since it takes longer for a woman to get back into the mating pool. (Evolutionary Psychology, 109)

Many people believe that the reason females are the ones who should stay home to take care of the children is because of these very biological differences. People believe that it is just natural for a woman to handle this job. People think that the woman is the one that is responsible for caring for the children because she is the one who brought the baby into this world. Men probably do not understand that they put in 50% of the effort into creating the baby. Of course it may seem natural and sort of expected that the woman cares for the child; after all she took care of it for nine months without any problems. However, having children should not be left all up to the mother; there needs to be care from both parties, regardless of the fact that men need to go to work and make money. A woman’s job as a mother is sometimes just as difficult if not more difficult than many jobs, but no one sees mother’s getting paid for changing their child’s diaper, breastfeeding, or even cleaning up after them. (Thinking About Women)

The great debate over nature versus nurture brings up many discussions over human social behavior and biological factors. There are many traits that normally would seem to be biological such as the reason for why boys are typically larger than girls. It is not just the fact that boys are born with genes that make them bigger, but rather there are environmental influences on this as well. There is a very simple reason as to why boys are typically larger and that is the difference between the ways by which they are treated at a young age and even throughout their lives. Girls are always being told to sit quietly, cross their legs, not burp/fart in public, and do many other things that make girls evolve into being calm and quiet creatures, whereas boys are rarely told that it is impolite to burp or fart in public and not forced to wear clothes that would fly up and reveal their undergarments if they were to run, jump, or play in.

Dress, is a particularly important factor in the differences between boys and girls. Before a baby is born, people need to find out the sex of the baby so that they can buy gendered clothing. Pink if it is a girl; blue for a boy. As children grow up, it comes to be established that girls are to wear skirts and dresses (unless they can stray from the crowd and become Tom-boys), while boys tend to wear shorts or pants. This creates a big problem for the girls. It is difficult to run, play, and jump around a playground or on jungle gyms in skirts and dresses.

The first people that babies begin to learn from are their own parents. They are the greatest source of information in the years when a baby is growing up, and even throughout the rest of their lives. However, a baby’s parents also learned from their parents who learned from their parents, etc. This means that parents act with their children much in the same manner as their parents did with them, which shows that if a mother explained to her daughter that it is natural for a woman to stay home to take care of the children and home, satisfy her husband, and be in charge of all cooking and cleaning, then that girl will growing up thinking that that is right and she will continue on and teach her own daughter that. It’s not only what the parents literally teach the children that affects them, but also the way in which girls and boys are separately handled by the parents. Money and Ehrhardt wrote, “The girl continued to receive typically girlish toys from her parents so she continued more and more to show feminine interests, as in helping her mother.” (Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, 125) Obviously if a mother gives her daughter toys such as toy-kitchens that come with ovens that can actually bake real cakes, the daughter will eventually love to bake cakes. And obviously if a boy is given race cars, trucks, and Lego building sets that actually involve thinking and planning, it demonstrates the difference between the treatment of boys and girls at an early age.

Culture is another factor that affects the social construction of gender. A person’s culture is a big part of a person’s life. In many cultures, it is natural that women are the ones who stay home to cook, clean, feed, and breed, along with satisfying the man’s needs and desires when he comes home from work. In these types of cultures, the woman’s work at home is not even considered a job. Actually, nowhere in the world is that considered a job, but rather thought of “natural” that women do those things. Even just saying that there are two different sexes is a social construction, because the different types of hermaphrodites are not included. Andersen writes, “Human beings make up the system by which we classify bodies; the meaning attached to this is not inherent in the body itself, but in the social meaning our bodies acquire because of culture,” which means that the biological differences are not what