Gender Stratification

Essay by binman00College, UndergraduateA+, October 2004

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Chapter 10 of Henry Tischler's Sociology text is full of information about Gender Stratification. Tischler does an excellent job informing students about the treatment of women throughout history. He gives many examples of different cultures and religions and their views of women and how they were to be treated. One of these examples were lines written by Fu Hsuan of China in the 3rd century:

" They (boys) are treated like gods as soon as they are born.... But a girl is reared without joy or love, and no one in her family really cares for her.... And no one sheds a tear when she is married off."#

Another belief system in Chinese society, from the same page of the text, was that women had 3 obedience's in life. The first obedience was to her father, the second an obedience to her husband, and the final obedience was to her sons when she was left a widow.

This insured that women were never able to live their own lives and were always under the control of someone else.

In today's world we know that women throughout history have been forced to cover themselves, to obey their husbands, and refused the rights to own land or vote. I was quite shocked to read about Thomas Jefferson and a letter he wrote to his daughter. In the letter he wrote:

"The happiness of your life now depends on continuing to please a single person. To this all other objects must be secondary."#

I had a hard time accepting that Thomas Jefferson could believe in this way of thinking so much as to teach it to his own daughter. Especially a man who signed the Declaration of Independence.

When I further researched this topic I found a lot of countries still practice callous...