Charlotte
Perkins Gilman
1. Gender inequality
explains most of individual experience, the ills in society and history.
Gender inequality = women comprised half the world’s
population, did two thirds of the world’s work, earned one tenth of the
world’s income, and owned one hundredth of the world’s property. (UN
1980)
2. Explain: how men and women came to have their respective
societal roles, and why societies developed gender inequalities.
3. Intellectual influences:
Marxism, symbolic interactionism, and
social Darwinism.
4. Division of labor of the
traditional family. – economic
dependence on men.
5. socialization –
differential socialization leads to and
sustains gender inequality. Girls forced to act, think, look and
talk differently from boys.
6. Interconnectedness of
nature-nurture,
7. social Darwinism –
Manifest Destiny, “survival of the Fittest”
8. Spoke out against: slavery, oppressions, genocide
9. corset metaphor = false consciousness
10. social structure
exists prior to the individual but is
maintained by individual interactions,
11 challenged and threatened core values such as “family values”.
12. In Women and Economics
she likens women to a horse.
13. Yellow Wallpaper – the
sexual politics in male /female relations.
Sociology
1. theory building
2. meaning of work
3. social pathologies
4. suggests strategies for change
5. 3 themes: production and
reproduction of gender stratification
impact of gender stratification on societal organization –general,
economic
strategies for social change
6. evolutionary Imagery
7. public/private econom
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