Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on the role of woman in western society. The funny thing about gender is that we are led to believe that it is innate and something that we are born with. . As Aaron Davor so eloquently points out, gender is created, acquired and constructed by the greater society at large. . Sex has a biological basis and is predetermined at birth. . Gender, on the other hand, is a social construction and gender roles and expectations are unique to each and every society. . As social actors, individuals play an important role in the construction and creation of gender roles, attitudes and expectations and are not simply passive recipients of societal expectations about how men and women are to behave. From the perspective of generativity, initial concerns about the implications that the employment of mothers outside of the home would have on the mother-child relationship have largely been proven to be unfounded. . Children whose mothers work outside of the home have been proven to develop normally and without any problems. . Again, questions of gender must always be understood to be socially constructed (Davor 33). .From a historical perspective, American society has been patriarchal since its establishment and the employment of women in the public sphere is a relatively new phenomenon. . Patriarchy is defined as a type of social structure in which men are perceived as being superior to women and it is impossible to understand the construction of gender roles and expectations in modern Western society without first understanding the omnipresent patriarchal nature of our society. . Patriarchy is subconscious and not universal. . In fact, matriarchy, a society which is structured with women at the helm, has been found in places as diverse as Latin America, India, and parts of Africa (see Amadiume 1997). . Despite the diversity, modern Western culture is characterized by its patriarchal nature and this has important implications in a variety of social realms. .
