When it comes to life, everyone is completely different in a sense of what we do and how we interact. As certain events go on, like at a party or family gathering, it is easy to point out the gender norms and roles that are present in the room. Gender norms are present in different sex roles as in a female or male. They are norms that people feel like are socially acceptable while in a social setting. An event where this was exposed to me the most was seeing my family participate in a Thanksgiving dinner. When I look back at my Thanksgiving experience, which was held at my house, it really shows a difference in genders as to how everyone interacted with one another and participated in cooking, cleaning, and socializing. I believe that these norms can sometimes take back a person from really showing who they are just because being a certain way is more acceptable. By breaking down my Thanksgiving dinner I can definitely recall events where gender norms were played out at various times throughout the entire afternoon.
Waking up on Thanksgiving morning, I can already smell the turkey cooking in the oven. I jump out of bed and run down the stairs to greet my parents. Already gender norms come into play as I see my dad sitting on the couch watching tv and my mom in the kitchen starting on the sides for the food. My dad asks me to ask my mom if she needs any help. To me this is a typical thing of a dad to ask the daughter to see if the mom needs helps with preparing the food. Why can’t he get up and find something to help with? After all that is my mom, but also his wife. Maybe she would enjoy his company and help, but we wouldn’t know, would we? I would say our house is a good size, two floors, huge opened kitchen with a wrap around counter, a living room with a 50’ tv, and then the dining room with an opened window and a wooden table with 12 seats. As my family arrives, I can already guess where everyone is going to hang out at. Typically, I am almost certain that all the women will be back and forth between the kitchen and the living room and this includes my mom, me, aunt, grandma, cousin, and my cousins little baby girl. For the guys as in my uncle, two teen cousins, brother, dad, grandpa, and little nephew are outside in the garage with the football game on the radio and either playing cornhole or throwing football. One would think that this is a time where everyone should be gathering, helping and socializing with each other, but the wrath of gender norms has gotten in the way of this.
When we have Thanksgiving at our house, my family and I usually have obligations and expectations held over one another to make sure the day goes smoothly. Usually the one that makes all of the delicious food happen is my mom. She wakes up at 5 in the morning to start cooking for everyone. It’s not that my dad is a bad person for not helping, but to my mom it’s expected of her to be in the kitchen cooking. One of many stereotypes that women have is being in the kitchen preparing food, which was turned into a gender norm that many women feel like it’s their place to cook and feed family, especially around Holidays. After my mom tells the family that the food is ready, we all sit down at the table and eat. We sit, gather, and enjoy each other’s company. When everyone is done eating, my brother and I go into the kitchen to help pick up a bit. We get out plastic containers to put the leftover food in while everyone gets up and starts socializing around the house and outside. My mom comes back in the kitchen to thank me and my brother for cleaning up a bit, but we barely do any cleaning compared to what she does. Usually my mom and cousin are the ones that start washing the dishes and cleaning up. What is expected out of everyone else there, especially my dad and uncle, is them asking if they need any help. I don’t really think they ask with the intentions that my mom is going to say yes, but they do it out of respect. This can also be seen as an expected gender norm for men, because they are always the ones that ask to help clean up, because the woman has prepared and cooked all of the food. I believe that this can be a kind gesture from the men as a sign of acknowledging that cleaning needs to be done, but that doesn’t mean that the men really want to do it. This is because gender norms make it expected of women to be able to take care of the mess and clean it up.
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Continuing on with the evening, you would think everyone would be sitting around and interacting with one another. That’s completely wrong when looking at my family. The females and males are both split up after eating just as they were before. The men are in the living room watching another football game and the women are in the dining room cutting out coupons and looking on computers for the best deals they can get for shopping. I’m not really one to sit and look at the coupons for shopping or watch an entire football game. I find myself wondering back and forth between these two rooms and thinking, “Why is it so difficult to all be in the same room together and socializing?” Even though the males are in the living room watching football and the women are at the dining table looking at shopping deals, it is acting the same in a sense. Both groups are surrounded by people that have the same interest as them, which also breaks them up in these norms that are set for males and females. Society thinks males go towards sports and these “manly things,” and then we have females towards shopping and “girly things.” This has made my family fall for these gender norms for years and think in a way that this is what we should be doing because of our gender.
When it comes to life, everyone is completely different in a sense of what we do and how we interact. As certain events go on, as in my families Thanksgiving event, it is easy to point out the gender norms and roles that are present in every room. From really seeing the break down of how everyone socializes and reacts to one another, it has definitely opened my eyes to see that gender norms are present and does a good job at separating one another. This really holds us back at times from being able to all come together to find things that we all enjoy and just really be there as a whole family. These norms are made from the overall population thinking that things are more acceptable for each specific gender. Thanksgiving in my case, or really any event shouldn’t be based on gender norms because I feel that it holds us back from being as sociable as we can be. In life it’s nice to relate and talk to everyone, why hold that back just because society thinks differently on what genders should do?
