⌚ Social And Social Stereotypes In The 1950s

Edward Kennedy Confirmation Reflection are also known to form and maintain them. September This makes the wife seem more in control of her own life, instead of letting her husband control her. Not buying the premise. Password Forgot your password?

How They Raised Girls To Be Women In The 1950s

The cognitive mechanism is complex Ernst, Kuhlmann, and Vogel, , but the bottom line is that a distinctive person doing a distinctive thing captures our attention and influences our subsequent thinking. There is a tendency for those of us in Western cultures to over-estimate the extent to which people do what they want to do, and to under-estimate the extent to which people do things that are prescribed by their social roles. Therefore, when we see people in a particular role, we tend to assume that they are well-suited for it and, by extension, not so well suited for other roles. For example, women are more likely to have responsibilities for rearing children, so on average they spend more time than men nurturing others.

Seeing that, we come to believe that women are naturally nurturing, downplaying the extent to which they may simply be carrying out the responsibilities of their roles. Reverse the sex roles, and the impressions we have of the sexes change, too Eagley and Steffen, Race, like gender, determines many of the roles people hold in this country. People of color are over-represented in low-paying jobs, and therefore can seem to White people to be somehow destined for them. To the extent, then, that we are more likely to see members of particular groups in some roles, and less likely to see them in other roles, we develop stereotypes as a result.

Stereotypes can shift as roles shift, sometimes in surprising ways. In hindsight, of course, it is easy to understand the sociological factors that prevented Black students from playing for the best teams, or kept the best Black teams from playing for championships. At the time, however, it seemed to Schneider and his friends like a logical deduction from their unbiased observations about the world of Hoosier sports. Now people watch NBA games and come away with the equally ludicrous conclusion that all Black people are innately hyper-athletic. What we believe depends, in part, on what we see—but what we see is a function of social roles and arrangements that are created by a complex set of historical, political, and economic factors.

The Bottom Line: Stereotypes are pervasive, and powerful, in part because they affect how we see the world even when our subjective experience leads us to believe we are simply describing the world as it actually exists. We rarely believe ourselves to be influenced by stereotype, making us even more susceptible to their effects. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Notify me of new posts by email. I have done essays mostly on gender roles and femininity rather than the masculinity. I wish I had thought to include media influence beyond advertisements. This was such a great read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It seems even more unlikely when we consider all the social economical pressures and changes the country has experienced in the past say ten or fifteen years. The use of drugs, a growing population of minorities and non minorities who [as the rich get richer] continue to make almost desperate efforts to educate their families and move up the social ladder against a myriad of social pressures that at times seems to be deliberately set to hold them back, the explosion of violence on TV today, the wild proliferation of violent movies and computer games that basically teach kids how to be violent which in effect lowers the threshold for acceptable behavior.

For my money, all these and several more I can think of have changed our culture today so dramatically in ways that those of us who grew up in the fifties could not have imagined. I could go on, but the article strikes me as an attempt to pick a decidedly unique and provocative topic and scrap around for references as vague as they may be in order to come up with a new idea and sound especially scholarly along the way. Not buying the premise.. My view is the author of the article may want to look at those links to violence against women in relationship to old and long forgotten shows. Shiss, thank you for your response, but I argue that you are misinterpreting what I wrote. I am not arguing that the television shows from the s are linked to violence against women today.

I am actually arguing, with the help of recent scholarship and recent studies that have been done, that the television shows of the s may have contributed to violent behaviors in the men of the s. I am also not considering any sort of comparison between television shows from the s and television shows from today, that is far beyond the scope of this paper. My paper is considering possible linkages between violent behavior and these television shows. The recency of the evidence that I use does not dismiss its importance or its validity. I respectfully ask you to reread the arguments I have written and keep in mind that this is not at all a contemporary analysis of violence against women. Very sorry.

I have to admit on a second reading of your article, I did have the wrong interpretation. My wife worked as a volunteer in a local domestic violence center and to many times the abusers she characterized made excuses that tried to redirect what was happening rather than working towards resolving their own problems. They seemed to want a degree of understanding and I too quickly assumed your article was heading in a direction away from what I see as being more direct causes. Sorry for reacting too quickly and thank you for writing back to me.

As soon as the bit about women in the work place were seen as comedic was mentioned, all I could think was the I love lucky episode with the chocolate conveyer belt. Also very interesting to know that domestic violence was such an issue in a time period we like to romanticize as perfect so often. What I find interesting is that there were two wars that occurred during the height of these TV shows: the Korean and Vietnam. These TV shows, while undoubtedly perpetuating familial violence in future generations, were, at the time, calming and grounding for the adult population when chaos still threatened their security. While the idea of male stereotypes and female subordination perpetuated in these TV shows is unappealing to our minds in , perhaps if we puts ourselves in the mindset of the time, we might find a more empathetic understanding of what it was like to live in such times.

I heard these comments a lot growing up around male uncles and cousins who were so fearful of having their masculinity undermined. It was confusing for me as a girl to hear these things because I wondered why it was that made it so bad to be like me, a girl. I believe that it is television shows, among a long history of male dominance, that creates this understanding that being masculine is preferred over being feminine. Your article was interesting in taking it one step further in defining how domestic violence can sprout from from media reinstating what it means to be a man.

Nice work. I think the good news about human nature is that although the basic rights, wrongs, and expectations that are embedded in us are essentially unchanged over thousands of years so there is consistency through the generations. Our human nature also seems to provide for us a willingness to be flexible and to adjust in order to survive. The bad news I think is [that] flex or willingness to adapt can be manipulated by things like a steady stream of violence on TV, the prominent macho sportsman image, and of course killer computer games. Does anyone remember the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Ward tells the Beav to read Ivanhoe, and as a result of having read it, the kid gets in a fight and is banned from the schoolbus?

I have a problem with the study that was used to support this argument. Since the subjects were asked to rate themselves, that leaves room for bias that can not be accounted for. Of course, maybe we view subordination differently. I wonder how this work of scholarship can be complicated by not only racial differences but maybe even incorporate the rates of violence against those who belong to the LGBTQ community as well. Controlling for geography and class groups may also spring about some surprising conclusions. I do, however, agree that the gender roles on television shows during that time were very strict and allowed for little wiggle room, if any. With that being said, I think that while the shows were more tasteful and did not contribute to violence during that time any more so than the shows and music nowadays promote violence.

The women were appreciated for what they did even though they were often only portrayed as doing housework. Likewise, men were appreciated for what they did and both genders helped each other out when possible. There was a mutual respect, but also a mutual appreciation for the exact tasks that each gender completed. The only similarity was the suit and tie. The thought of such a home to claim must have been a contributing element to the mentality of men who were raised on that promise.

I must admit that I was enjoying this article until I realized that it was an attack on masculinity. True that 50s television portrayed a stereotype, but those depicted men did not devalue women; they honored and respected them. It was simply a structured hierarchy that is still needed today to run a smooth operation. Stay at home mothers had and still have the most important Jobs. They are the nucleus of the family. Now what do we have in ? Single parent households, both parents working, and kids learning about sex, drugs, and violence in our ultra liberal school districts.

Violent behavior? Blame feminine men and their misguided women for creating broken families and for lacking the moxy to properly rear their children. Now the overarching them in TV commercials is the smart, in charge woman and the doltish, bumbling male. Women in traditional roles are also attacked. See my blog for examples.. I respectfully disagree with your hypothesis. Like many people I know, I am the product of a traditional family where Dad worked and Mom was a homemaker.

My mother adored him as he did her and they both worked together teaching my sisters and I respect, responsibility, and many other important values. By watching my father, I learned what being a real man meant. My wife and I have been married for 30 years and we have 3 adult children. Today we have 3, educated, compassionate, and mature adult children with deep family roots and I attribute at least part of that to the proper influences we allowed into their lives from classic shows like these. I believe television shows and movies that feature strong, supportive father figures, married couples who love and support one another, and children with respect for their parents and society would actually have the opposite influence that your article suggests.

Our society needs more men like that. I am trying to cite your paper as a source and give credit. May I ask your name or author name? I am using the paper for discussion purposes. I am laughing, out loud. Nobody should be pegged into a role. It skews what we all believe. My mother was a CFO of a large corporation in the s and my dad stayed at home with my sister and me and took care of the household duties.

We still watched all the sitcoms and still laughed. Sitcoms were sitcoms. And the hell with the psychiatrists trying to explain why sitcoms were the way they were. We just liked watching them and having a laugh or two. Too much is put into everything. What has happened to our men now? An interesting essay that stated to address a serious point. The discussion on violence toward women, essentially tied to the impact of the way males, or husbands in particular, were portrayed on TV shows was just starting to be raised in this essay and then it just stopped.

Maybe that can be addressed in a detailed future essay. I wonder if as we came out of the s and into the s whether changes in how family life was portrayed on TV had some impact on actual violence toward women. I have not seen anything relating to these shows and their effects and contributions. My fother to, work all the time but always made time for his family that was in the 50 and 60 i was born i the What Shakespeare may have sensed but could not have fully understood is that human beings evolved to live in social groups.

For a few million years, Homo sapiens and their evolutionary forerunners have survived and flourished by virtue of their ability to live and work together in complex social groups, cooperating with each other to solve problems and overcome threats and competing with each other in the face of limited resources. As social animals, human beings strive to get along and get ahead in the presence of each other Hogan, Evolution has prepared us to care deeply about social acceptance and social status, for those unfortunate individuals who do not get along well in social groups or who fail to attain a requisite status among their peers have typically been severely compromised when it comes to survival and reproduction.

It makes consummate evolutionary sense, therefore, that the human "I" should apprehend the "Me" first and foremost as a social actor. For human beings, the sense of the self as a social actor begins to emerge around the age of 18 months. What they see is an embodied actor who moves through space and time. These emotions tell the social actor how well he or she is performing in the group. When I do things that win the approval of others, I feel proud of myself. When I fail in the presence of others, I may feel embarrassment or shame. When I violate a social rule, I may experience guilt, which may motivate me to make amends.

Many of the classic psychological theories of human selfhood point to the second year of life as a key developmental period. Erikson argued that experiences of trust and interpersonal attachment in the first year of life help to consolidate the autonomy of the ego in the second. Coming from a more sociological perspective, Mead suggested that the I comes to know the Me through reflection, which may begin quite literally with mirrors but later involves the reflected appraisals of others. I come to know who I am as a social actor, Mead argued, by noting how other people in my social world react to my performances. In the development of the self as a social actor, other people function like mirrors—they reflect who I am back to me.

Research has shown that when young children begin to make attributions about themselves, they start simple Harter, At age 4, Jessica knows that she has dark hair, knows that she lives in a white house, and describes herself to others in terms of simple behavioral traits. Trait terms capture perceived consistencies in social performance. They convey what I reflexively perceive to be my overall acting style, based in part on how I think others see me as an actor in many different social situations.

Roles capture the quality, as I perceive it, of important structured relationships in my life. Taken together, traits and roles make up the main features of my social reputation , as I apprehend it in my own mind Hogan, If you have ever tried hard to change yourself, you may have taken aim at your social reputation, targeting your central traits or your social roles. Maybe you woke up one day and decided that you must become a more optimistic and emotionally upbeat person. Taking into consideration the reflected appraisals of others, you realized that even your friends seem to avoid you because you bring them down. Research suggests that broad traits tend to be stubborn, resistant to change, even with the aid of psychotherapy. However, people often have more success working directly on their social roles.

To become a more effective social actor, you may want to take aim at the important roles you play in life. What can I do to become a better son or daughter? How can I find new and meaningful roles to perform at work, or in my family, or among my friends, or in my church and community? By doing concrete things that enrich your performances in important social roles, you may begin to see yourself in a new light, and others will notice the change, too.

Social actors hold the potential to transform their performances across the human life course. Each time you walk out on stage, you have a chance to start anew. We can see actors act, but we cannot know for sure what they want or what they value , unless they tell us straightaway. As a social actor, a person may come across as friendly and compassionate, or cynical and mean-spirited, but in neither case can we infer their motivations from their traits or their roles. What does the friendly person want? What is the cynical father trying to achieve? These kinds of theories explicitly conceive of the self as a motivated agent. To be an agent is to act with direction and purpose, to move forward into the future in pursuit of self-chosen and valued goals.

In a sense, human beings are agents even as infants, for babies can surely act in goal-directed ways. By age 1 year, moreover, infants show a strong preference for observing and imitating the goal-directed, intentional behavior of others, rather than random behaviors Woodward, Still, it is one thing to act in goal-directed ways; it is quite another for the I to know itself the Me as an intentional and purposeful force who moves forward in life in pursuit of self-chosen goals, values, and other desired end states. In order to do so, the person must first realize that people indeed have desires and goals in their minds and that these inner desires and goals motivate initiate, energize, put into motion their behavior.

According to a strong line of research in developmental psychology, attaining this kind of understanding means acquiring a theory of mind Wellman, , which occurs for most children by the age of 4.