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A gender role, or sex role, is a set of socially accepted behaviors and attitudes deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity .
Mary Frith ("Moll Cutpurse") scandalized 17th century society by wearing male clothing, smoking in public, and otherwise defying gender roles. Sexologist John Money coined the term gender role in 1955. The term gender role is defined as the actions or responses that may reveal their status as boy, man, girl or woman, respectively. [44]
Despite its relatively short life, gender history (and its forerunner women's history) has had a rather significant effect on the general study of history.Since the 1960s, when the initially small field first achieved a measure of acceptance, it has gone through a number of different phases, each with its own challenges and outcomes, but always making an impact of some kind on the historical ...
These gender roles were often decided at a young age. If a boy was interested in women's activities, or vice versa, a gender variant role would likely be undertaken in adulthood. "In some societies, same-sex sexual desire or practice did figure into the definition of one's gender variant role, in others, it did not."
Normative gender roles can be reinforced outside of the household, adding power to these established ideas about gender. An analysis of children's books in the twenty-first century, by Janice McCabe, suggests that this particular avenue of children's media symbolically annihilates females, representing them about half as often as that of males.
Clear-cut gender norms prevailed among the farm families who settled in the Midwestern region between 1800 and 1840. Men were the breadwinners who considered the profitability of farming in a particular location – or "market-minded agrarianism" – and worked hard to provide for their families.
[61] [62] Whether or not social roles, such as religious leadership, were based upon gender, rather than age or skills, continues to be debated. [63] Some archaeological evidence suggests that gender, in the sense of social and behavioral distinctions, arose "at least by some 30,000 years ago". [64]
As Fagot (1990) found, children had a pronounced response when one of their peers violated their established gender role. [52] Same-sex peers acted as the distributors of both rewards for proper gender role behavior and punishments for improper gender role behavior [citation needed].