Gender Roles

1. Gender Roles Things Fall Apart Ch. 5-6

2. Gender role • A set of behaviors considered normal for a particular gender by a particular society. • Distinction between sex (biological) and gender (socially constructed). • While most cultures express two genders, some express more. 

3. Gender balance • Some societies see one gender (usually male) as dominant and superior. In others, the two are seen as complementary opposites. • This resembles the Chinese concept of yin-yang , which describes how seemingly opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world. Each gives rise to each other as they relate to one another.

4. Gender balance Yin: slow, soft, yielding, diffuse, cold, wet, and passive; associated with water, earth, the moon, femininity and nighttime. Yang: fast, hard, solid, focused, hot, dry, and aggressive; associated with fire, sky, the sun, masculinity and daytime.

5. Gender balance • Everything has both yin and yang aspects, (for instance shadow cannot exist without light). Either of the two major aspects may manifest more strongly in a particular object, depending on the criterion of the observation.

6. Gender balance • In Igbo (Ibo) culture, everything is gendered, from the crops that men and women grow, to characterization of crimes. • Much of the gender theme in the book centers around the idea of balance between masculine and feminine forces – body and mind/soul, emotionality and rationality, mother and father. • If one is in imbalance, it makes the whole system haywire.

7. Women in Igbo Culture • In Igbo culture, women are considered the weaker sex, but are also endowed with qualities that make them worthy of worship, like the ability to bear children. • Ezinma defies convention: she sits like a boy and wishes to carry her father’s chair. She is admired and respected (and apparently destined for great things).

8. Men in Igbo Culture • The ideal man provides for his family materially and has prowess on the battlefield. • Nwoyedefies convention. He is sensitive and imaginative; he prefers his mother’s folk tales to his father’s tales of battle.

9. Gender balance • Okonkwo is extremely concerned with being hyper-masculine and devalues everything feminine, leaving him rather unbalanced.

10. Things to Consider • How are gender roles different in different societies? • How can societies address the need for gender balance?

11. The Case of Mother’s Day • Anna Jarvis gathered women of the Appalachian mountains together in what she called “mother’s day work clubs,” in which women worked together to eliminate poverty. When the Civil War came about, the clubs created medical camps. They were places of nonviolence for men from both sides who were wounded in the war. • At the end of the Civil War, Anna Jarvis organized the Mother’s Day Friendship Day, which was a call for radical peace. Anna Jarvis brought together the leaders from the north and the south for a time of reconciliation. Mother’s Day was originally about reconciliation and peace.

12. The Case of Mother’s Day • Anna Jarvis’ daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, approached President Woodrow Wilson and petitioned for a national Mother’s Day. It was Woodrow Wilson who called for the second Sunday of May to be the national Mother’s Day. • Instead of being a day for women who were active and present in the world, however, it became a day to celebrate mothers who stayed at home with the children. • Jarvis was so angry with President Wilson that she filed a lawsuit. She was finally committed to a sanitarium where she died, penniless and bitter.