Sexism and racism both involve imposing a set of expectations on groups in society. Sexism has not been eliminated from American life any more than racism has. Sexism exists because we teach our children sex-role stereotyping, and children learn from their parents the conception of "feminine" and "masculine." Much about these conceptions is not biological at all but cultural. The way we tend to think about men and women and their gender roles in society constitute the prevailing paradigm that influences our thinking. In her book Women's Magazines 1940-1960, Nancy A. Walker notes how these women's magazines packaged a set of behaviors, roles, expectations, attitudes, and values related to domesticity and which, of followed, would enclose women in a relatively narrow range of choices. In writing about blacks and how they are treated in American society, Richard Wright in his book Black Boy also suggests ways in which blacks are given a packaged set of roles and attitudes to which they are expected to conform. How would Wright have viewed the expectations and attitudes imposed on women and how alike or how different would he have seen them from those imposed on blacks?
Walker suggests that the way women were depicted in the woman's magazines reflected the way society at large wanted women to be. In the first half of the 1940s, for instance, women were shown in roles of active participation in the national war effort; in the second half, however, they were shown in "containment in a private kitchen" (Walker 16). She cites William Graebner to the effect that this was not as big a change as it might seem:
Women spent the decade meeting the needs of men and capital; filling the factories as producers, then, after the war, soothing the fragile male ego. doing housework, and heading the family's department of consumer affairs (Walker 16-17).
In the 1950s, "the postwar emphases on consumerism, home ownership, and the nuclear family intensified" (Walker 17). The idealized family presented in these magazines was not part of a long tradition but was rather a "new phenomenon created by postwar America at least in part to celebrate democracy and capitalism in the face of the cold war threat of communism" (Walker 17-18). The world now presented to women was almost entirely domestic. This was the image presented in advertising and articles alike. Ann Griffith finds that these magazines had four major themes -- cleanliness, competitive cookery, improved romance, and devices for the kitchen (Walker 235-236).
Richard Wright would certainly recognize the underlying dynamic, that those with the most social control, namely white males, determine (however consciously or unconsciously) the roles to be played by those with less power. Wright's book Black Boy is a non-fiction work which recounts the early life of the author, pointing out many of his formative influences as a young black man in the South at a time when racism was rampant. America at the time was a land in which whites enjoyed all the advantages while the blacks were relegated to poverty and were discriminated against at every turn. Wright found that he had to behave in a certain way to survive, and yet in the long run he did not learn his lessons as well as did some others. A deep anger infuses his writing, and often it is directed as much at black society for allowing if not accepting this disparity as it is toward white society for creating it in the first place. Black Boy is both a personal account and a document detailing the social structure of a people in a certain time and place. In many ways, this autobiography has a subversive intent, undermining traditional notions of autobiography, setting the author forth as a rebellious spirit more by accident than design, and challenging the traditions of American autobiography in particular, which were usually books telling the reader how the author had pulled himself up by his bootstraps to succeed and so how the reader could do the same. Wright has also succeeded, but his anger is not something the reader would or is expected to emulate unless the reader is also black and has had the same experience. This autobiography is itself infused with this anger to such a degree that it shapes the way he tells his story and comes through to the reader as a palpable quality. The work is nontraditional in that it is novelistic...
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