The Great Gatsby Gender Roles

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a book published on April 10, 1925. The Great Gatsby is commenting on the social times of the 1920’s. Fitzgerald does this by using the 1920’s social standards of gender roles and ethnic prejudices to recreate the rebellious time of the Roaring Twenties’. This book is narrated by Nick, who is also a character within the story and he tells his point of view on the story of Gatsby’s life. Gatsby, as a poor fellow, falls in love with a high class women and loses her but never stops loving her. Therefore, he spends the rest of his life obsessing over her and trying to prosper for her, but no matter how rich he is or how many extravagant parties he throws, he's never going to be good enough in her eyes,

Gender roles within the society, of the time, were sort of in a transition with the new decade of the 20’s. Gender roles are defined as the role or behavior learned by a person as appropriate to their gender, determined by the prevailing cultural norms. On example of gender roles is women not being able to vote because their primary jobs were to stay at home and tend to the house and children, which in most cases meant that parents would send boys to school over the girls because girls wouldn't get real jobs. Therefore men thought women were uneducated and believed they didn't deserve voting rights. In the contrary, “15 states had extended equal voting rights to women, and the amendment was formally supported by both parties and by the president, Woodrow Wilson” (Nineteenth Amendment). This support wasn't enough to pass the amendment just yet because it barely made the ⅔ vote in House of representatives to pass it and then failed when it go to the US

But this didn't stop women from their hopes of getting this basic right. This lead to the National Woman’s Party which led campaigns in order to convince the senators that didn't vote for their cause. Until August 18, 1920, women didn't have the right to vote. That day the 19th Amendment, which stated that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”, was ratified (Nineteenth Amendment). But this doesn't always mean they actually always let women vote, there are loopholes for everything especially if a government is corrupt. Along with this dramatic change, women as a whole started to change. In Social Trends in the 1920s: Overview it states, “Finally, greater numbers of working-class women worked outside the home in factories, stores, and offices, and growing numbers of middle-class women attended college and entered professional careers.” Which probably gave women more of an advantage in life because they were proving the dominant sex wrong. Women