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Gender
2 articles on Gender
Gender
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 3772 Includes: Law, Custom, Degendering | Gender, Economics, and Free Blacks | Gendered Daily Life | Fighting Back | Reconstruction, Racism, and Regression | BibliographyGender roles in enslaved African American families in the United States before the Civil War were many and varied. Beliefs and traditions handed down through African family lineages; the pressures of environmental conditions (including geographical locations); British and American slaveholder practices in the treatment of their “property”; the forced separation of husbands from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters; local politics and resulting laws with regard to the enslaved; the personal beliefs of individual slaveholders; and changing economic patterns were among the factors determining gender roles. Throughout colonial American times, the slave population increasingly consisted not of Africans but of African Americans. The creation of an African American culture, replete with evolving gender roles, stemmed not only from African generational heritage ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 3462It is important to understand gender as different from sexuality. Sexuality concerns physical and biological differences that distinguish males from females. Cultures construct differences in gender. These social constructions attach themselves to behaviors, expectations, roles, representations, and sometimes to values and beliefs that are specific to either men or women. Gendered differences—those that society associates with men and women—have no necessary biological component. Instead of biology, socially agreed upon and constructed conduct, and the meanings cultures assign to that conduct, constitute the area of gendered difference.Labels of ““essentialism”” can attach themselves to arguments that gender and sex have an inherent relationship. However, a cultural essentialist, who is interested in issues of gender, may ...
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