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How Has Gender Changed over Time

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Submitted By jac965
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This essay will be drawing on an article of ‘Dad’s new role’ as an example of how gender is changing in the twentieth century. It will discuss how gender has changed over time through individualisation and detraditionalisation and why sociologists are still focusing on gender issues. The father’s role at home is under negotiation, according to Coltrane (1998) the role father’s play at home is being negotiated between men and women, trying to come to new ways to solve family work roles. Even though most people agree that men and women are equal, gender is still one of the major determinants of one’s life chances. Gender is also individualised, Beck (1992) writes, individualisation is the dual process where , under conditions of reflexive modernity, individuals are disembedded from historical social forms and commitments including those related to class and gender and then re-embed in new ways of life in which they must produce, stage, and roughly assemble together their lives themselves. In other words the individual is presumed to be actors, designer and stage director of his or her own biography identity. Gender refers to a set of culturally defined characteristics which determine society’s view of people as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.
Oakely (1970) pointed out that across cultures and historical periods there were considerable differences in the ways in which women and men were expected to behave, she also stated that across cultures and history that performance of gender could differ significantly across time and space. The separation between sex and gender established the idea that there is no such thing as naturally male or female behaviour. De Beauvoir (1949 [trans. 1972]) wrote that women are ‘made and not born’, she also argued, that feminine behaviour has many aspects to it, there is no one act of femininity, but

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