Gender Roles In To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. Gender roles were huge in the 1930’s, everyone had an expectation of how they were supposed to participate in society. Many of Lee’s characters go against those gender roles but some of them support the traditional values. First of all, these are the gender roles of the southern part of the United States of America during the 1930’s, during the Great Depression. Everyone had an expectation but they varied vastly between men and women, they also changed based on the social class of the man or woman. Men were often seen as strong and intelligent. They are viewed as the ones who labor all day to provide his family with money for food,

Scout has always been a tomboy. She even prefers that people call her Scout, which is typically a male nickname, instead of her real name Jean Louise, which is very feminine. Other girls her age are usually much less destructive, more polite to her peers and elders, more likeable, and overall better people, even at the age of 6-9. In her earlier years Scout beat up several boys for little to nothing, Scout beat up Walter Cunningham because she got in trouble for defending him. Not even her two closest male friends Jem and Dill, her brother and their friend, respectively, were that violent, even though Jem was a young boy beginning puberty. Almost everyone around her kept telling her that she needed to start acting like a girl and grow up, even her brother, one person she thought she could always rely on. On page 115 “overnight, it seened, Jem had acquired an alien set of values and was trying to impose them on me: several times he went as far as to tell me what to do. After one altercation when Jem hollered “It’s time you start bein’ a girl and acting right!” I burst into tears and fled to Calpurnia.” Jem’s comments obviously upset her, that is basically what she heard for the first 9 years of her life. It was always filled with everyone around her, except for Atticus, disapproving of how she acted because she did not live up to their societal

The ladies that were constantly telling Scout that she needed to be like them, the ladies from Aunt Alexandra’s church get-together. They were all proper older ladies, probably in their early to mid 40’s, they always wore dresses and the appropriate perfume. Scout described them during the gathering on page 229. “The ladies were cool in fragile pastel prints: most of them were heavily powdered but unrouged; the only lipstick in the room was Tangee Natural. Cutex Natural sparkled on their fingernails, but some of the younger ladies wore Rose. They smelled heavenly.” They were the opposite of Scout, she always wore pants and probably was not very clean all the time. They support the stereotype of how the ladies should look and act to the public but at home ladies were expected to cook, clean, and do more cleaning. That job was left to characters like Calpurnia and Sophy, they are both paid black workers of a family, Calpurnia works for the Finches and Sophy works for Mrs. Merriweather's family. They wash the clothes, cook for them, clean the house, and in the case of Calpurnia, she looks after Jem and Scout, even teaching them how to read and write as young children. They are the stereotypical cooking, cleaning housewife of the depression. On pages 115 to 116 Scout is talking about Calpurnia and she acknowledges what it is like to be a lady. “She seened glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen,