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independent, self-reliant, strong, courageous, daring, responsible,
forceful, authoritative, and successful. These stereotypes have nothing
to do with an individual’s personality, his or her own personal
strengths and weaknesses, or likes and dislikes.
There are at least four disadvantages for women that are associated
with traditional gender role stereotypes. For one thing, women tend to
be treated differently and less positively than men by the educational
system. Ultimately, women tend to enter fields where they make
significantly less money than men do. A second disadvantage of
gender role stereotyping for women is a greater likelihood of having a
negative self-concept. A third disadvantage is that even when they do
work outside the home, they are still expected to do the majority of the
housework and child care. The fourth disadvantage is that a woman’s
value is often defined by men in terms of her body and appearance.
Men prefer women who look like Barbies with large breasts and
hourglass figures.
Men, too, experience lack of freedom and negative consequences
from gender role stereotyping. First, they are pressured to establish an
identity through their work. A man holding a job with lesser status is
often thought to be a lesser person. Related to occupation is how much
money a man makes. Men who make less money are thought as less
masculine than men who make more money. The second negative
impact is the pressure not to express emotions. Men are taught that
they should not cry, and that they should be strong and decisive. They
should especially withhold the emotional demonstrations associated
with weakness, such as depression, fear and sadness. A third negative
consequence involves the fact that men have an average lifespan that
is seven years less than that of women. Biology, of course, is
involved. However, the implications of traditional gender role
pressure are also apparent.
The ongoing problem for both men and women is that gender
stereotypes pressure people to conform. They do not allow much room
for individuality and creativity. Abolishing gender stereotypes may
give us all the freedom to develop more realistic expectations and to
live the way we choose.
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ASSIGNMENT
Make lists of adjectives used in the text to characterize men
and women.
DISCUSSION
1. What is wrong with gender role stereotypes?
2. What are the qualities that are traditionally associated with
women? With men? Would you add or change anything on this list?
3. In what way are Russian gender stereotypes similar to the
American ones? Do you observe any differences?
4. What are the differences in parents’ treatment of boys and girls?
What are the potential consequences of such differential treatment?
How would you treat your son or daughter?
5. What are the main disadvantages for women related to gender
role socialization?
6. Do men experience any negative consequences from gender role
stereotyping?
7. Do you think it is possible to abolish gender role division?
TEXT 3
THE MEN WE CARRY IN OUR MINDS
by S. R. Sanders
When I was a boy, the men I knew labored with their bodies. They
were marginal farmers, just scraping by, or welders, steelworkers,
carpenters; they swept floors, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks,
their forearms ropy with muscle; they trained horses, stoked furnaces,
built tires, stood on assembly lines wrestling parts onto cars and
refrigerators. They got up before light, worked all day long whatever
the weather, and when they came home at night they looked as though
somebody had been whipping them. In the evenings and on weekends
they worked on their own places, tilling gardens that were lumpy with
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clay, fixing broken-down cars, hammering on houses that were always
too drafty, too leaky, too small.
The bodies of the men I knew were twisted and maimed in ways
visible and invisible. The nails of their hands were black and split, the
hands tattooed with scars. Some had lost fingers. Heavy lifting had
given many of them finicky backs and guts weak from hernias. Racing
against conveyor belts had given them ulcers. Their ankles and knees
ached from years of standing on concrete. Anyone who had worked
for long around machines was hard of hearing. They squinted, and the
skin of their faces was creased like the leather of old work gloves.
There were times, studying them, when I dreaded growing up. Most of
them coughed, from dust or cigarettes, and most of them drank cheap
wine or whiskey, so their eyes looked bloodshot and bruised. The
fathers of my friends always seemed older than the mothers. Men
wore out sooner. Only women lived into old age.
As a boy I also knew another sort of men, who did not sweat and
break down like mules. They were soldiers, and so far as I could tell
they scarcely worked at all. During my early school years we lived on
a military base, an arsenal in Ohio, and every day I saw GIs in the
guard-shacks, on the stoops of barracks, at the wheels of olive drab
Chevrolets. The chief fact of their lives was boredom. Long after I left
the Arsenal I came to recognize the sour smell the soldiers gave off as
that of souls in limbo. They were all waiting — for wars, for transfers,
for leaves, for promotions, for the end of their hitch — like so many
braves waiting for the hunt to begin. Unlike the warriors of older
tribes, however, they would have no say about when the battle would
start or how it would be waged. Their waiting was broken only when
they practiced for war. They fired guns at targets, drove tanks across
the churned-up fields of the military reservation, set off bombs in the
wrecks of old fighter planes. I knew this was all play. But I also felt
certain that when the hour for killing arrived, they would kill. When
the real shooting started, many of them would die. This was what
soldiers were for, just as a hammer was for driving nails.
A nearer and more hopeful example was that of my father, who
had escaped from a red-dirt farm to a tire factory, and from the
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assembly line to the front office. Eventually he dressed in a white shirt
and tie. He carried himself as if he had been born to work with his
mind. But his body, remembering the earlier years of slogging work,
began to give out on him in his fifties, and it quit on him entirely
before he turned sixty-five. Even such a partial escape from man’s fate
as he had accomplished did not seem possible for most of the boys I
knew. They joined the Army, stood in line for jobs in the smoky
plants, helped build highways. They were bound to work as their
fathers had worked, killing themselves or preparing to kill others.
A scholarship enabled me not only to attend college, a rare enough
feat in my circle, but even to study in a university meant for the
children of the rich. Here I met for the first time young men who had
assumed from birth that they would lead lives of comfort and power.
And for the first time I met women who told me that men were guilty
of having kept all the joys and privileges of the earth for themselves. I
was baffled. What privileges? What joys? I thought about the maimed,
dismal lives of most of the men back home. What had they stolen
from their wives and daughters? The right to go five days a week,
twelve months a year, for thirty or forty years to a steel mill or a coal
mine? The right to drop bombs and die in a war? The right to feel
every leek in the roof, every gap in the fence, every cough in the
engine, as a wound they must mend? The right to feel, when the layoff comes or the plant shuts down, not only afraid but ashamed?
I was slow to understand the deep grievances of women. This was
because, as a boy, I had envied them. Before college, the only people I
had ever known who were interested in art or music or literature, the
only ones who read books, the only ones who ever seemed to enjoy a
sense of ease and grace were the mothers and daughters. Like the men
folk, they fretted about money, they scrimped and made-do. But,
when the pay stopped coming in, they were not the ones who had
failed. Nor did they have to go to war, and that seemed to me a
blessed fact. By comparison with the narrow, ironclad days of fathers,
there was an expansiveness, I thought, in the days of mothers. They
went to see neighbors, to shop in town, to run errands at school, at the
library, at church. No doubt, had I looked harder at their lives, I would
have envied them less. It was not my fate to become a woman, so it
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was easier for me to see the graces. Few of them held jobs outside the
home, and those who did filled thankless roles as clerks and
waitresses. I didn’t see, then, what a prison a house could be, since
houses seemed to me brighter, handsomer places than any factory. I
didn’t realize ― because such things were never spoken of ― how
often women suffered from men’s bullying. I did learn about the
wretchedness of abandoned wives, single mothers, widows; but I also
learned about the wretchedness of the lone men. Even then I could see
how exhausting it was for a mother to cater all day to the needs of
young children. But if I had been asked, as a boy, to choose between
tending a baby and tending a machine, I think I would have chosen the
baby. (Having now tended both, I know I would choose the baby.)
So I was baffled when the women at college accused me and my
sex of having cornered the world’s pleasures. I think something like
my bafflement was felt by other boys (and by girls as well) who grew
up in the dirt-poor farm country, in mining country, in black ghettos,
in Hispanic barrios, in the shadows of factories, in Third World
nations ― any place where the fate of men is as grim and bleak as the
fate women. Toilers and warriors. I realize now how ancient these
identities are, how deep the tug they exert on men, the undertow of a
thousand generations. The miseries I saw, as a boy, in the lives of
nearly all men I continue to see in the lives of many ― the bodybreaking toil, the tedium, the call to be tough, the humiliating
powerlessness, the battle for a living and for territory.
When the women I met at college thought about the joys and
privileges of men, they did not carry in their minds the sort of men I
had known in my childhood. They thought of their fathers, who were
bankers, physicians, architects, stockbrockers, the big wheels of the
big cities. These fathers rode the train to work or drove cars that cost
more than any of my childhood houses. They were attended from
morning till night by female helpers, wives and nurses and secretaries.
They were never laid off, never short of cash at month’s end, never
lined up for welfare. These fathers made decisions that mattered. They
ran the world.
The daughters of such men wanted to share in this power, this
glory. So did I. They yearned for a say over their future, for jobs
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worthy of their abilities, for the right to live at peace, unmolested,
whole. Yes, I thought, yes, yes. The difference between me and these
daughters was that they saw me, because of my sex, as destined from
birth to become like their fathers, and therefore as an enemy to their
desires. But I knew better. I wasn’t an enemy, in fact or in feeling. I
was an ally. If I had known, then, how to tell them so, would they
have believed me? Would they now?
CULTURAL ASSOCIATIONS
Look up the following entries in the Dictionary of U. S. Life and
Culture («Жизнь и культура США: Лингвострановедческий
словарь») or other dictionaries and encyclopedias:
Army, U.S.
astronaut
cash
Chevrolet
ghetto
GI
highway
Ohio
ADDITIONAL VOCABULARY
to labor
labor (v) ― to work hard; to toil
to scrape by (phr v) ― 1. to have just enough money to live 2. to
only just succeed in passing an examination or dealing with a
difficult situation
warrior
warrior (n) ― a soldier or a fighter who is brave and experienced ―
used about people in the past: noble warrior
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to baffle (v) ― to cause to have difficulty in understanding and
confuse so much that effective action is impossible: The question
baffled me completely.
bafflement (n) – something that you cannot understand or explain
to fret (v) about/over― to worry about something, esp. small and
unnecessary things: The old lady is constantly fretting about
something.
to run errands
errand (n) ― a short journey in order to do something for
someone, for example delivering or collecting something for them:
I seem to spend my life running errands for people.
blessed (adj) ― 1. holy: Blessed Virgin 2. very enjoyable or desirable:
a few moments of blessed silence 3. spoken used to express
annoyance: Where have I put that blessed book?
wretchedness (n)
wretched (adj) ― 1. very unhappy; in very low spirits: the poor
wretched girl 2. extremely bad or unpleasant, miserable: I was
shocked to see their wretched living conditions. 3. making you feel
annoyed or angry: Where are those wretched keys?
to cater to the needs
to cater (v) ― to provide and serve drinks at a party, meeting,
usually as a business: Who’s catering your daughter’s wedding?
to cater for ― to provide a particular group of people with the
things they need or want: Vegetarians are well catered for.
to cater to ― to try to satisfy (desires or needs, esp. of a bad king):
Those newspapers cater to the lowest tastes. She refused to cater to
his ridiculous demands.
to tend (a baby, a machine, etc.)
to tend (v) old-fash ― to look after someone or something, to take
care of: She tended her husband lovingly during his long illness.
Also: to tend to: Sofia was in the bedroom tendering to her son.
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to exert on
to exert (v) ― to use one’s power, influence, etc. in order to make
something happen: The company has been exerting pressure on
me.
to exert oneself ― to work very hard using a lot of physical or
mental energy, to make an effort: He never exerts himself in order
to help anyone.
misery (n) ― 1. great suffering that is caused for example by the
being very sick or very poor: the misery of unemployment/war
2. great unhappiness: His face was a picture of sheer misery.
miserable (adj) ― 1. extremely unhappy, for example because of
being lonely, sick, cold, or badly-treated: I spent the weekend
feeling miserable. 2. bad-tempered, dissatisfied, or complaining:
He is a miserable old devil. 3. making one feel very unhappy,
uncomfortable: Mosquito bites can make your life very miserable.
4. very small in amount, or bad in quality: The team gave a
miserable performance.
ally (n) – 1.a country that agrees to help or support another country
in a war 2. someone who helps and supports you when other
people are trying to oppose you: a network of political allies
3. something that helps you succeed in a difficult situation:
Exercise is an important ally in your campaign to lose weight.
alliance (n) – 1. an arrangement in which two or more countries,
groups, etc. agree to work together to try to change or arrange
something 2.a group of two or more countries that work together in
order to achieve something 3. formal a close relationship,
especially a marriage between people
EXERCISES
I. Translate paying attention to the active vocabulary:
1. Ridley was one of the Queen’s closest allies.
2. She knew she had found an ally in Ted.
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3. The companies have formed an alliance to market the product.
4. Relief workers in alliance with local charities are trying to help
the famine victims.
5. The question baffled me completely.
6. Joan has catered functions for up to 200 people.
7. Most perfume ads cater to male fantasies.
8. She was always sending me on errands.
9. They exerted considerable influence within the school.
10. Environmental groups are exerting pressure on the
government to tighten pollution laws.
11. He has exerted tirelessly on behalf of the charity.
12. Don’t fret – everything will be alright.
13. She is always fretting about the children.
14. They labored all days in the mills.
15. I’ve been laboring over this report all morning.
16. Ray had little talent but labored to acquire the skills of a
writer.
17. Janice looks really miserable.
18. Why do you make yourself miserable by taking on too much
work?
19. They endured hours of backbreaking work in miserable
conditions.
20. It was a miserable gray day.
21. I can hardly afford the rent on my miserable income.
22. In the rural areas, people can scrape by, thanks to what they
grow themselves.
23. That bronze corset can make even the most peace-loving
warrior a little cranky.
24. Drink was always a problem for some executioners, though it
doubtless provided a blessed relief from their horrific duties.
25. Billy lay on the bed, wretched and close to tears.
26. With a violent drunkard for a husband, he thought, that
wretched woman must lead a life of terror.
27. There was nothing to do but put the wretched thing on.
28. Rose was outside tending the garden when the fire broke out.
29. Mom was usually busy tending to my younger sisters.
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II. Paraphrase the following sentences, using the active
vocabulary.
1. The exact nature of black holes continues to surprise scientists.
2. What astonishes me is how anyone could escape from the jail in
broad daylight.
3. In later poems she is usually shown as treacherous and
malicious, using deadly and destructive power over men.
4. All that work for this one stupid paycheck!
5. All the staff seemed to look unhappy and the atmosphere was
not at all pleasant.
6. Dana was not feeling well, and she looked sick.
7. He sat all alone in his room, thoroughly uncomfortable.
8. Cabin staff will take care of your every need.
9. Children are well looked after at the Hotel Paradiso.
10. Opponents worry that the system might not provide enough
help in times of rural economic crisis.
11. She worries all the time ― I think it’s because she’s got no
one to talk to about her problems.
12. Shipman was seated in his office, toiling over his paperwork,
when I came in.
13. The goal was just what the team needed, at the end of a game
in which they had worked hard to overcome Chelsea.
14. I hadn’t thought of the poor man in the last two hours ― at
least barely thought.
III. Translate paying attention to the active vocabulary:
1. Спасатели трудятся день и ночь, пытаясь спасти люде
пострадавших от урагана.
2. Тому едва хватает денег на самое необходимое, об
излишествах он и не мечтает.
3. Доблестный воин король Артур стал героем англо-
саксонского эпоса.
4. Его реакция на вопрос озадачила меня.
5. Прекрати суетиться и займись сборами в дорогу!
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й,