Gender Roles In What's Wrong With Cinderella

Watching old shows like Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, it is obvious that our current ideas about gender roles has shifted away from the idyllic family of the husband working and the wife staying at home to look after all the domestic needs. This is mostly because of the economy which as forced many women, whether they want to be or not, to join the work force to keep food on the table and a roof over their families head. While women have embraced this change and used it to show that they can do the same jobs males can, it has been harder for men to accept that they are no longer the sole provider for a family anymore, as pointed out in the article Why We Need to Reimagine Masculinity. It has become a necessity for many people

The article What’s Wrong With Cinderella points out that female toys are all pink and purple and focus on cooking, princesses, and dolls while boy toys are blue or green and are more active and aggressive. It is not that children especially like these colors or activities, but that they are given little to no choice to pick anything else because this is what is marketed to their gender and therefore that is what they get to play with. While many people, like the author of What’s Wrong With Cinderella, are pushing against this feminizing and pink painting of everything female, the older generations are having a harder time shifting their views on gender and gender roles. This was highlighted when Target announced that they were removing gender from some of their signs. There was a wave of comments on Target’s social media sites stating that people were taking their business elsewhere because it was inconvenient or pandering to feminists to remove the gender from signs. These people didn’t seem to think that little girls could want superhero bedding or little boys would want princesses so the taking away gender had to be about

While there is evidence that adolescent girls who adhere to a traditional view on femininity are more depressed, I think that has more to do with how many women are attacking that type of femininity than the gender role itself. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get married and be a stay at home mother, the problem is when people tell you that it is what you should want and do and that anything else constitutes failure. The same holds true for traditional views of masculinity, taking pride in work with your hands is not wrong, but believing that you are only worthy if you are sole provider for the family is damaging when it is almost impossible for that to be the case. This puts social workers in an interesting position because while we use the person-in-environment model to help individuals, we also have our own biases when it comes to gender. The person-in-environment model allows us to look at an individual’s culture, socioeconomic status, and all the other factors and help them deal with the gender roles expected or them or to help them define what they want their gender roles to be. On the other time, we cannot ignore that our society is still conservative and an individual choosing to express their gender in a certain way can lead to a lot of backlash that the individual has to be