Gender Roles in Children’s Books: An Examination of Little House in the

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, â€Å"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 â€Å"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, â€Å"Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender† (Lorber, 1994) is one example of a piece of literature that examines â€Å"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 â€Å"gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives† (Lorber, 1994). One of the ways that people allocate others for performing tasks in society, then, is through gender classification. After discussing socialization theory, Lorber goes on to give several examples of how people â€Å"do gender† in today’s society. For example, she discusses how men with baby carriers are stared at approvingly on the bus because these men are seen as changing the role of fathers more towards the domestic end of the spectrum, a role that was previously played only... ...ly. While Wilder’s characters exhibit traits that help to reinforce the gender norms created by society, Rowling seems to suggest that life is more interesting when these traditional gender roles are bent, just as life is more exciting at Hogwart’s than at the Dursley household. Therefore, in order for males and females to feel comfortable taking advantage of the plethora of opportunities that are available to them, members of society must strive to bend the gender roles that they have assigned. Works Cited Lorber, Judith. â€Å"Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender† Excerpts from: Paradoxes of Gender (Chapter 1) by Judith Lorber, 1994 Yale University Press. Web. http://faculty.ucc.edu/english-chewning/SocialConstructionOfGender.pdf Messner, Michael. â€Å"Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities† Journal of Contemporary Ethnography January 1990 vol. 18 no. 4 416-444 http://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/18602_Chapter_5.pdf Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York City: Scholastic, 1997. Print. Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House in the Big Woods. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 1953.