Gender Roles In To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

What Gender Roles May Come to Maycomb?

In the 1930’s Deep South, discrimination of many types, including sexism, is integrated into daily life in the tiny, tight-knit Alabama town of Maycomb. One of many expectations and roles that women were thought to be fit for during this time period was that many women were not expected to have office jobs, rather, staying home and baking, cooking, and cleaning. Scout’s community, which influences her greatly, includes her explicitly feminine aunt, Alexandra, her peers, including her older brother Jem, and her father, Atticus, who are both males. As a young girl, the narrator Scout Finch is beginning to realize that there are strict expectations for her because of her gender and limitations to what she

In To Kill a Mockingbird, the author, Harper Lee, displays through the townspeople of Maycomb’s actions, words, and opinions women’s negative gender-based expectations and what their roles in society should be through the

When asked by Scout why women cannot serve on juries, Atticus’s guess is that “‘it’s to protect our frail ladies from sordid cases like Tom’s. Besides,’ Atticus grinned, ‘I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried– the ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions’” (252). Atticus’s word choice displays exactly what he thinks women are, “frail”, meaning weak and delicate. In Atticus’s mind, these women are so weak that they cannot handle one “sordid” case. Atticus believes that women’s roles are not to be in the courthouse, because if they were, they would “be interrupting to ask questions.” The belief the reader can draw from the previous statement is that Atticus thinks women to not be intelligent or capable enough to understand complex scenarios. By saying these statements, Atticus is showing his reluctance to open his mind and realize that women can perform judicial and other duties as well as men. A second instance of gender roles is that a crime, according to the government, is “using abusive and profane language in the presence and hearing of a female” (11). By declaring that “profane” language, meaning swears, are not to be used around women, the