Women are creatures brimful of courage. Theirs is not exactly the same quality as manly courage; that would never do, hang it all: we should have to give up trampling on them. No; it is a vicarious courage. Nothing can exceed the resolution with which they have been known to send forth men to battle; as some witty dogs says, “Les femmes sont tres braves avec le peau d’autrui.” It is given to very few men to meet good women on the threshold. We find them after hard buffeting, and usually we find the one fitted for us, when our madness has mis-shaped our destiny, our lot is cast. For women are not the end, but the means of life. Sex refers to our biological maleness of femaleness. There is a biological sex and a genetic sex, which is determined by our sex chromosomes, and anatomical sex, the obvious physical differences between males and females. Gender is a concept that encompasses the special psychosocial meanings added to biological maleness or femaleness.

Thus, while our sex is linked to various physical attributes (chromosomes, penis or vulva, and chest or breast, and so on), our gender refers to the psychological and sociocultural characteristics associated with our sex—or in other words, ones masculinity or femininity. The terms masculinity and femininity are used to characterize the behaviors that are typically attributed to males and females. One undesirable aspect of these labels is that they may limit the range of behaviors that people are comfortable with expressing. For example, a man might hesitate to be let a female be the sole support of the household as he might be labeled as feminine, and a woman might be reticent to act assertively and get a crew cut hair style for fear of being considered masculine. It is not our intention to perpetuate the stereotypes often associated with being a man or a woman. However, we find it necessary to use these terms when discussing gender issues, so we do not have a race of babies that hate the ladies, who make the babies. Nonetheless, without man planting a seed, there would be no life. Women are born the accomplices of mischief. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

Young men take joy in nothing so much as the thinking women angels: and nothing sours men of experience more than knowing that all are not quite so. There is something about a fine man on his knees that is too much for women. If any single thesis could be said to constitute the doctrine of existentialism, it would be that the possibility of choice is the central fact of human nature. Even the thesis that existence precedes essence often means no more than that men do not have fixed natures that limit or determine their choices, but rather it is their choices that bring whatever nature they have into being. When we meet people for the very first time, many individuals quickly note their sex and make assumptions based on their maleness or femaleness about how they are likely to behave: These are gender assumptions. For most people, gender assumptions are an important part of routine social interaction. We identify people as being either the same sex as ourselves or the other sex. (We avoid terms like opposite sex because we believe it overstates the differences between males and females.)

Many of us find it hard to interact with a person whose gender is ambiguous. When we are unsure of our identification of someone’s gender, we may become confused and uncomfortable. I think girls are very like boys. I am beginning to think that the subsequent immense distinction is less one of sex than education. They are drilled into hypocrites. A girl so like a boy was not quite his ideal of a girl. She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like; they have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. There is nothing more displeasing to a man of sense than to see his wife make no difference between matters of the greatest moment, and those of no moment at all.

When a good lady in the same tone of voice, and with equal concern, inquires after her husband’s health, and how a spot came upon the floor, the consequences is natural that he thinks a spot upon the floor affect her as much as his own health. The first is that choice is ubiquitous. All ones actions imply choices. Even when you do not choose explicitly, as some may not do in the majority of cases, my action bears witness to an implicit choice. Gender identity refers to each individual’s subjective sense of being male or female. Most of us realize in the first few years of life that we are either male or female. However, there is no guarantee that a person’s gender identity will be consistent with his or her biological sex, and some people experience considerable confusion in their efforts to identify their own maleness or femaleness.

The second contention is that although in many of my actions my choices are governed by criteria, the criteria which I employ are themselves chosen, and there are no rational grounds for such choices. The third is that no causal explanation of my actions can be given. A man of any fashion never blushes for his wife, whatever she may be. For his mistress, indeed, he may blush: for if there are any small failings there, his taste may be called in question. Gender role (sometimes called sex role) refers to a collection of attitudes and behaviors that are considered normal and appropriate in a specific culture for people of a particular sex. Gender roles are established sex-related behavioral expectations that people are expected to fulfill. However, I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. The woman is supposed to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed. When we use the terms masculine and feminine in subsequent discussion, we are referring to those socialized nations.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of tyranny over her. Some of our social perceptions actually cause people to act in certain ways. Many women play a submissive, domesticated, naïve part because they know their husbands expect it. Or they may be afraid to be independent because they think they need husbands for support. So, gritting their teeth, they swallow their more liberated tendencies and play Donna Reed. What gentleman will bear with a learned wife? Besides being culturally based, our notions of masculinity and feminist are also dependent on the era in which they occur. For instance, if an American father in the 1950s had not raised his children, and ran off to live his own life, while his wife traveled on business, his behavior would probably have raised eyebrows, if not engendered ridicule.

It is better for a man to be at home with his children than to have a home without a father. Staying together for the children’s sake may be a good thing. Children from two-parent families are better off emotionally, socially, and economically. They are also 50 percent less likely to experience teenage pregnancy, sexual exploitation, sexually transmitted viruses or disease, and will more than likely stay out of trouble and are 74 percent more likely to graduate high school. Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kanas, actually wanted to create a bill that would allow married couples with children to get a marriage bonus of up to $9,000.00 a year. In delicate minds, love is seldom the consequence of marriage. If people married for affection, there would be no such thing as gallantry at all. More than any other time in our history, the present era is marked by redefinition of male and female roles. Many of us who have grown up subjected to strong gender-role condition are now exploring how these roles have shaped our lives and are seeking to break away from their limiting influences. Being part of this change can be both exciting and confusing.

The struggle for women’s rights was revitalized in 1890 when the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations merged. They sought a wide variety of expanded rights for women, its task was greatly facilitated by the proliferation of women’s groups that emerged during the Progressive era. With increased industrialization, for the very first time, women had the opportunity to purse actives other than those centered on the home. Women worked for improved sanitation, public morals, education, and the like.  Substantial houses fronting the main streets concealed the worst urban housing, which was in back alleys or even backyards. Many visitors did not even realize slums lay behind the rows of brick housing, nor did they know of the uncollected garbage, privy runoffs, and fetid decay in the dark unpaved alleys.

Mrs. Paris and I went to the lowest part of the City to see some poor persons who had called upon us for Charity. We found one woman, with two children, and expecting soon to be confined, living in a cellar, part of the floor in the cellar was dirt and rocks, and exhibited much wretchedness; but it was tolerably clean. She was a teen bride and her husband had beat up, broken her legs and sent her to the hospital. When she returned home the keys to her house had been changed and a woman threw malt liquor in her face and told her to get lost; her husband occasionally worked. They were not poor, but he refused to support his wife and children any longer, even when he was employed, because he felt that he lost much of his authority and power in the family. Some found their wives no longer subservient or seemingly careless with their hard-earned money. One woman angered her husband by failing to give a clear account of what she had done with the grocery money. He said if she did not give him a full account…he would kill her or something like that. The squabbles over grocery money ended in murder. This family was an extreme case, but family violence that spilled out onto the streets was not uncommon in working-class quarters.

Although some ventured into the World of the working class, their life could not have been more different. Members of the new middle class, like ones father, profited from the dramatic increase in wealth in antebellum America. They lived in pleasantly furnished houses in the mountains, enjoying more peace, more privacy, and more comfort than the less affluent. Franklin stoves gave warmth in the Winter, and iron cookstoves made cooking easier. Conveniences like Astral lamps made it possible to read after dark. Bathing stands and bowls ensured higher standards of cleanliness. Rugs muffled sounds and kept the heat in. Material circumstances were one badge of middle-class status, but there were others as well. The acceptance of certain norms and values also identified a person s member of the new middle class. Genteel behavior and the careful observance of elaborate rules of etiquette ( a gentleman was expected to back out of a parlor after making a call upon a lady) the appropriate clothes and conversation, an elegantly furnished parlor for the for the entertainment of visitors—all served to establish the standing of the members of a middle-class family.

New expectations about the roles of men and women, prompted partly by economic change, also shaped the middle-class life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the labor of men and women, adults and children, all contributed to the family’s economic welfare. However, improved transportation, new products, and the rise of factory production and large businesses changed the family economy. Falling prices for processed and manufactured goods made in America, like soap, light bulbs, clothing, and even bread made it necessary for women, except on the frontier, to continue making these items at home. As men increasingly involved themselves in a money economy, whether through commerce or market farming, women’s and children’s contributions to the family welfare became relatively less significant. Although middle-class women and children still worked in their homes as their husbands left to bring home the bacon, they often neither produced vital goods nor earned money. Even the rhythm of their lives, oriented to housework rather than the demands of the clock, separated them from the bustling commercial World where their husbands now labored. By the 1820, the notion that gender roles occupied separate spheres emerged to express the new reality. Men’s sphere was the public World, whereas women’s was the domestic.

Many of us who have grown up subjected to strong gender-role conditioning are now exploring how these roles have shaped our lives and are seeking to turn their attention to the processes whereby we acquire our gender identity. Certainly gender identity usually—but not always—comes with the territory of having certain biological parts; however, there is more to it than simply looking like man or a woman. The variety of interpretations suggests that perhaps different experiences are being discussed or that the ratio of interpretation to experience may be too high. However, on the extreme and exceptional experience is common to all existentialism. Everyday experiences, by contrast, are thought of as conventionalized, predigested aid to complacency, conformity, and self- deception.

Since the existentialist writer acknowledges the sovereignty of individual choice and the important of the concrete situation, he cannot address himself to his audience in the manner of traditional philosophy, for the readers has to make one’s own choices in the light of his or her own experiences. Argument will be powerless unless the reader chooses to agree with the author’s premises. If you choose this starting point, then that logically follows that men were charged with the task of financial support, a responsibility was a heavy one in changing economy. Women’s duties included working at home, not as producer, but as housekeeper. The role of housekeeper had both pleasure and frustration built into it. However, satisfactions derived from a cozy household. Yet, it was sometimes impossible to achieve the new standards of cleanliness, order, and beauty. A few of the inconveniences in the house are: sick children, poor domestics—that undermined efforts to create a person harmonious home. Women were expected to become systematic, neat, and thorough housekeepers, whatever the personal costs might be, they were also given more elevated responsibilities as moral and cultural guardians of their own families and, by extension, of society as a whole. Believing that women were innately pious, virtuous, unselfish, and modest (all characteristics that men lacked).

By training future citizens and workers to be obedient, moral, patriotic, and hardworking, mothers ensured the welfare of the republic. Just as important, they preserved important values in a time of rapid change. Because men had none of women’s virtues and were daily caught up in the face-paced World of business, wives were responsible for helping husbands cope with temptations and tensions. A wife was, in words of one preacher, the guardian angel who watches over her husband’s interests, warms him against dangers, comforts him under trial; and by…pious, assiduous, and attractive deportment, constantly endeavors to render him more virtuous, more useful, more honorable, and happier. As a boy, sometimes you have to let the girl win. However, with other boys’ fair competition is more better. Whatever conveys the idea of subjection necessarily destroys that of love, of which I am so convinced, that I have always wished the word OBEY expunged from the marriage ceremony. This view characterizing women as morally superior to and different from men, had important consequences for female life. Women by ill temper make husbands pay dear for their fidelity. Marrying a man one dislikes is the most deliberate and shameful degree of vice of which the human mind is capable. Because women thought they had a unique nature and because their husbands spent much of their time away from home working friendships with other women often became central. Women felt that they shared more with one another than with men, even their husbands. Similar social experiences and perspectives made female friendships a source of comfort, security and happiness. If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true matchmaking sometimes does so.

Although the concept of domesticity seemed to confine women to their homes and to emphasize the private nature of family life, it actually prompted women to take on activities in the outside World. If women were the guardians of morality, why should they not carry out their tasks in the public sphere? God’s appointed agent of morality—such reasoning lay behind the tremendous growth of voluntary female associations in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Initially, most involved religious and charitable activities. Women supported orphanages, paid for and distributed religious tracts and Bibles, established Saturday and Sunday schools, and ministered to the poor. The associations provided women with congenial companions and suitable tasks for their moral character.  Female domestic behavior was encouraged. Domestic ideals helped many women make psychological sense of their lives. The new norms, effectively spread by the publishing industry, influenced rural and urban working women. The insistence on marriage and service to family discouraged married women from entering the work force. Those who had to work often bore a burden of guilt. Many took in poorly paid piecework so that they could remain at home. Though the new feminine ideal may have seemed noble to middle-class women in cities and towns, it created difficult tensions in the lives of working-class women, working class children still worked or scavenged for goods to sell or use at home, but middle-class children were no longer expected to contribute economically to the family. Middle-class parents now came to see childhood as a special stage of life, a period of preparation for adulthood.

In a child’s early years, mothers were to impart important values, including the necessity of behaving in accordance with gender prescriptions. Girls were to be kind, smart, play with dolls, wear pink, have shoulder length or long hair, sit with their legs closed and talk a lot. Conversely, boys were supposed to be strong, happy smart, read books, play with trucks, wear blue, and have neat hair and love sports. Harsh punishments lost favor. Affection can govern the human with a sway more powerful than the authority of reason or even the voices of conscience. Schooling also prepared a child for the future, and urban middle-class parents supported the public-school movement. Children’s fiction, which poured off the printing press, also socialized children. Stories pictures modest youngsters happily making the correct choices of playmates and activities, obeying their parents, and being dutiful, religious, loving, and industrious; however, occasionally, as The Child at Home (1833) or Home Alone (1990), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004) The Originals (2014) the audience could discover the horrible consequences of wrongdoing. The young girl who refused to bring her sick mother a glass of water saw her promptly die. Heavy-handed moralizing made sure that children got the proper message.  Because children required so much loving attention and needed careful preparation for adulthood, many parents desired smaller families.

The declining birthrate was evident first in the Northeast, particularly in cities and among the middle class. Contraceptive methods included abortion, which was legal in many states until 1860. This medical procedure terminated perhaps as many as 33 percent of all pregnancies. Other birth control methods included coitus interruptions and abstinence. The success of these methods for family limitation suggests that many men and women adopted the new definitions of female sex as naturally affectionate but passionless and sexually restrained. A single woman is a thousand times more shackled than a wife, for she is accountable to everybody; and a wife, you know, has nothing to do but manage her husband.  Man is not permitted, with ultimate impunity, to exasperate the envies, and the miseries of those around him, by a systematic perseverance in willful celibacy. Celibacy is popery and hell in perfection. It is the doctrine of devils, and a war with the Almighty. This is recognized of the impulses behind existentialism seems to be dissatisfaction with the kind of nineteenth-century materialism which held that if human actions can be causally explained, then determinism is true in a sense that excludes the possibility of human agents’ being responsible and free. However, instead of denying that causal explanation entails this kind of determinism, the existentialist takes the unnecessary stop of denying the probability of causal explanations of human action.