To Kill A Mockingbird Gender Roles Essay

In the title of the book To Kill a Mockingbird, gender roles play a big part in the time that the book was written. There are many examples of people being told what they could and couldn’t do based on their gender, and insults thrown around that are gender-based. One example of gender roles in the book are Jem’s comments on Scout’s behavior, especially when Jem and Dill are about to break into the radley’s. As they are discussing it, and Scout comes up and starts pestering them about what they are doing, Jem remarks that Scout is “gettin’ more like a girl every day!” pg. 53. They fact that Jem phrases this as a bad thing or an insult shows how the stereotype of women, as that of a housewife who doesn’t lead an exciting life of do anything outdoors, shows the separate roles that women and men played

41, and Atticus finds out. Scout gets worried that Atticus might know that what they were playing was related to the radleys, and tells Scout that she “was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.” this is one of the biggest examples of gender in the book, and shows that being a girl is the highest and worst insult, even amongst the children. And a few pages later, Scout says that she tried to avoid Jem and Dill because she was called a girl once and didn't want to be called a girl again. This really cements how much of an insult it is to be called a girl. Since this was in a time when women still didn’t play too big of a role in society, being called a girl implied that the person being insulted wasn't a particularly active person in the community. Since this life never crossed Scout’s mind, and she is hanging round with a bunch of boys, this is the highest insult to any of them, including the actual