The notions governing how men and women should behave are called gender roles. These largely unwritten rules are quite powerful, governing much of our behavior every day, including how we dress, what courses college students enroll in, what kind of car we drive, and even what we eat.
Figure 10-5: San Miguel, CA - Missions in California failed for several reasons, including disease and political shortcomings, but the sudden reassignment of gender roles to Indians undermined the economic viability and the cultural health of missions across California.
Although many people consider them immutable, gender roles constantly change and they vary widely by geography. Economic systems have a great deal of influence on gender roles. For example, hunter-gatherer societies and agriculturalists tend to feature gender roles where men hunt and women gather food and process it. This fact is one of the reasons why European efforts to enslave American Indians were generally unsuccessful. Enslaved male Indians tended to be very reluctant agriculturalists because farming/tending plants was considered women’s work among many Indian males who had been raised to be hunters and/or warriors. Spanish Missionaries in California had similar difficulties convincing male Indian neophytes at the Missions to abandon masculine hunting roles for more feminine agricultural roles. Men from agricultural societies in West Africa generally did not consider farming to be women’s work and therefore were not emasculated by farming.
The Industrial Revolution brought additional changes to gender roles. In earlier agricultural societies women and men had more similar economic roles. Successful farming in the pre-industrial age required all members of the family to work hard to plant, weed, harvest crops and tend animals. Men and women and children may have had different jobs back then, but women were essential to the survival of the family farm. Even in pre-industrial urban areas, families who were engaged in trades or crafts generally required that women play an important role in the production of goods and/or the management of the family business. Geographers point out that during the pre-industrial era, domestic spaces (family houses) were not just homes but also the family’s place of economic livelihood. Women and men worked side by side in the home which was a sort of “family factory”.
Figure 10-6: Angelino Heights, CA - This grand Victorian home evokes an era in which many of American’s traditional gender role norms were idealized.
Gender roles changed dramatically during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, when men, and sometimes women, started to work more frequently away from home. This era, also known as the Victorian Era, has had an enduring impact on gender roles in the United States and Europe. During this era, large numbers of middle-class men began to work away from the home, and middle-class women were left behind at home, tasked with housekeeping and child-rearing. As the economic roles changed, so did other expectations for women. Victorian values required “proper” women to be modest in dress, sober, private, and impeccably moral, especially when it came to sexual mores and marriage.
Poor women often worked as domestic workers, or occasionally in light-industry factory jobs where such employment was available; and though poor women may not have been bound to their residences, such employment was considered improper by the upper classes, who were influential in crafting public opinion about gender roles. Women of all classes had few rights to property, income, and political rights. They had little power over their own bodies, especially if they were married. All this is especially ironic given that the most powerful figure in the world at the time was Queen Victoria of England.
Victorian gender roles survived well into the mid-20th century. Additional changes in the economy began to erode some of the rules governing the proper behavior for women. In the United States and Europe, a backlash against the repressiveness of Victorian gender codes began with the age of the automobility. By 1920, women won the right to vote in the US. During the subsequent decade, many young women exercised their right to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, cut their hair short, wear makeup and comfortable clothes, to have sex and to generally violate Victorian gender codes. They called themselves flappers. Geographers would point out that flappers, also had very different spatial behavior – they were not bound to the home like their Victorian counterparts, many were prone to driving automobiles. At the time, flappers elicited considerable controversy. Today, flappers are widely considered important figures in the evolution of the women’s rights movement.
Flappers all but faded from the American consciousness during the Great Depression, but they were replaced admirably by the iconic mythic figure Rosie the Riveter during World War II. During the war, women were needed to work in factories because a significant percentage of young male factory workers were called to serve in the Armed Forces. Women stepped out of the house and into the factories and shipyards; places that had been largely reserved for men for the previous 100 years. After the war, women who had experienced the freedom of working outside the home, in defense of their country, demanded the right to continue working outside the home, especially because the good wages and benefits that came with factory work ensured them continued mobility. Women had certainly earned it.
Sports and Beauty Pageants
Geographers can analyze gender roles using a number of metrics, but two of the more interesting variables include the recreational choices made by boys and girls during high school. In places where girls are provided with opportunities and encouragement to participate in non-traditional female activities, like sports or hard sciences, they are also likely to find encouragement and opportunities in the career fields as adults that may have been denied to their grandmothers. Indeed differences in wages for men and women, known as the pay gap, generally reflect the trends evident in the maps of sports participation.
Figure 10-7: Nashville, TN - This "Rosie" operates a drill while working on a dive bomber in a factory during World War II. Source: Wikimedia.
Data from the National Federation of State High School Associations reveals that girls do not participate in high school sports at an equal rate across the U.S. In the Lowland South, where gender roles remain more bound to tradition, girls do not play sports nearly as much as boys. As few as one-third of participants in high school sports are girls in Alabama, but in Minnesota girls' participation in sports is on parity with boys (49%). Girls living in much of the Yankee region also participate in sports nearly as frequently as boys. The pattern of participation varies slightly by sport because some regions do not regularly offer some sports for boys (e.g. volleyball) or girls (e.g., wrestling). However, sports like basketball and track and field/cross country, which are widely available and have lower barriers to entry, tend to show that southern girls don’t play sports as much as southern boys and that girls up north generally play sports at about the same rate.
Figure 10-8: Map of US states showing the percentage of high school athletes participating in all sports who are girls.
One of the reasons girls in the Deep South may not play sports as much is because they are engaged in other school or out-of-school activities that are considered by Southerners to be more gender appropriate. Beauty contests, for example, are more popular in the Lowland South than elsewhere in the U.S. In Alabama, where girls participate in sports less than any other state, many elementary, middle schools and high schools host an event called a “Beauty Walk”, which is basically school-sponsored beauty pageant, complete with fancy dresses, and a panel of judges who evaluate girls on characteristics like, “beauty”, “poise” and the photogenic nature of young women and girls. The notion of a school officially sponsoring a beauty pageant may seem foreign to people in other parts of the U.S., but in the Deep South, debutante /cotillion balls and participation in organizations such as the Junior League hint at the lingering power of traditional gender roles, while functioning to reinforce these ideas. For boys at these schools, masculine sports, especially American Football, function both to remind and reinforce traditional gender roles. Given the regional cultural emphasis on traditional gender roles, its hardly surprising that states in the Deep South produce (per capita) far more pro football players and Miss America winners than any other region of the United States. It may come as no surprise then that in Deep South, women earn, on average, as little as 70% of what men earn. In New York and California, where equal pay laws are strong, women earn nearly 90% of what men do.
Figure 10-10: Map of US states by percentage of high school athletes participating in running sports who are girls.
The Equal Rights Amendment
In the post-war era, people who participated in the war effort, either in factories or on battlefields often found themselves not fully permitted to enjoy the fruits of the American economy or American democracy, both of which were held forth as important reasons to wage war with Germany and Japan. A new series of battles emerged on the home front in the form of various Civil Rights campaigns. Ethnic minorities fought for their rights and women fought for theirs. A key battle in the fight for women’s rights centered around an amendment proposed in 1971 to the US Constitution known as the Equal Rights Amendment or simply the ERA. Section 1 of the ERA, the important part read very simply, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex”. The proposed amendment had widespread support in both houses of Congress and from the White House. It only had to be ratified (approved) by three-fourths of the US state legislatures (38 of 50). Within five years, 35 states had ratified the ERA, and its inclusion in the US Constitution seemed certain. Several state legislatures in the Lowland South where social conservatives held power refused to ratify the ERA. A few states in the West also failed to ratify the ERA. Some states, affected by the rise of neo-conservative politics in the late 1970s, actually voted to rescind their vote to ratify the ERA as the deadline (1979) approached for states to make a decision. The deadline was extended into the 1980s, and there were several court cases argued about the legality of the extension and the legality of those states that rescinded their support. For a couple of decades, the ERA seemed to be dead, but in recent years Nevada and Illinois ratified the ERA, which set off lawsuits from more conservative states arguing that since the deadline had passed there was no legal way to move forward on the ERA. In 2020, Virginia ratified the ERA, bringing the total number of states that have ratified it to 38, which was the magic number for passage prior to the deadline. It is very likely that the ERA will return to the court system for additional years of legal wrangling.
Figure 10-11: US map of states by the ratification of the ERA. The states of the Confederacy and the Libertarian West refused to ratify the ERA.
Women’s Reproductive Rights
Closely paralleling the drama over the ERA has been the ability of women to control their bodies, particularly in terms of having children. In the pre-industrial age, women had little control over the number of children they were expected to bear. Women in many societies were to varying degrees considered the property of their fathers, brothers and/or husbands. They often had little to control over when and/or with whom they had sex, or to whom they were married. Refusing sex could even be very dangerous for married women. The rights of women improved slowly, especially in the 20th century. A major breakthrough in reproductive rights occurred in the early 1960s when birth control pills became widely available to the American public. The impact on the lives of millions of women is hard to overstate, though it should be noted that in some countries, birth control pills continued to be illegal or unavailable.
The right of women to control when to get pregnant and to have a child when they got pregnant was further extended when the US Supreme Court decided in 1973, in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, that American women could, without much government interference, end a pregnancy during the first three months of pregnancy, but that the government could regulate the conditions under which abortions could be performed after the first trimester. Before Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in much of the United States. Since Roe v. Wade, there have been numerous challenges to it brought before the US Supreme Court, but only technical changes have been made to the federal law since 1973. In many of the social conservative (traditionalist) states, however, a variety of laws have been passed in recent years that while maintaining the legality of abortion, functionally limit the conditions or location where women (especially poor women) can go to obtain a safe and legal abortion.
Public debate over abortion in the United States has been lengthy and intensive. Supporters and opponents of abortion follow patterns and alliances that frame American politics. Tradition-minded Southern conservatives tend to oppose abortion on religious grounds, and because they think it disrupts changes in well-established family norms. Moral-Progressives in states like Massachusetts and California tend to favor the rights of women to chose what to do with their own bodies. Western Libertarians tend to be pro-choice because they find anti-abortion laws an intrusion to personal liberties that they value.
Figure 10-13: District of Columbia. The March for Life is a large protest rally where "Pro-Life" or "Anti-Abortion" advocates express their desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. Source: Wikimedia
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