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Rules of Being a Woman

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The Rules of Being a Woman

For many years, women have been looked at as inferior in comparison to men. Our anatomical differences seem to have come with an instruction sheet on how each gender is expected to behave and live their lives. Lorber suggests rather than looking at just the physical sex organs of our body to determine how we are expected to act, people should look at “behavior and only then look for identifying markers of the people likely to enact such behaviors…” (729). Society has constructed multiple gender roles and when they aren’t met, you would be considered straying away from the norm. Women have always been degraded on due to the stereotypes society has created for them. Some of these stereotypes include the idea that women are domestic, sexual objects, and weaker than men. And between society and those women that have been affected by these stereotypes, we have slowly but gradually figured out how women have overcome these gender roles.
In Jessica Grose’s article “Cleaning: The Final Feminist Frontier Why men still don’t do their share of the dirty work” she gives us an overview of the amount of men and women who participate in household chores in the following statistic, “…about 55 percent of American mothers employed full time do some housework on an average day, while only 18 percent of employed fathers do.” So although this percentage has gotten better, assuming back then women were more degraded on when it came to housework, women still take the trophy for being more domestic. Julia suggests one reason why women have been and will always be perceived as being the care takers in the following sentence, “I suspect that women are more driven to keep a clean house because they know they—before their male partners—will be judged for having a dirty one.” Through hundreds of years of women cooking cleaning, women feel a natural pressure to do

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