Race+and+Gender

Selina Valles -- Race and Gender Charlotte Gilman was one of the first theorists to talk about the patriarchy. Though she does not get a lot of recognition for her work, her work gave way for future theorists to use her principles in their own work. Gilman is an evolutionist, one who believes that society is like a mechanism which evolves like simple cells to more complex ones, and like cells, society evolves from simple systems to more complex ones. Society finds its way to survive by relying on one another. In this chapter, Allen explains how animals are affected by their natural surroundings and how they change to adapt to their environments, this was also the case with humans until they became an organized society and began to be influenced by its social structures (p 141).

Gilman saw this new social structure as the economy. Humans developed the economy in order to keep society alive. Her theory of alienation, occurs with gender roles within the economy.She says that with the exclusion of women from the economy brought some dysfunctions. In her explanation of the economy, she talks about there being a balance of self-preservation and race-preservation. Self-preservation is concerned for ones own survival whereas race-preservation is concerned with the survival of an entire group. As long as these two were balanced, capitalism would function. In order to keep these two principles in equilibrium, society developed laws and culture (p.144).Capitalism created patriarchy so that society could become more complex but later became a dysfunction because it created a flaw in individuals’ survivability. Gilman says that originally patriarchy was functional in that it helped the economy grow and be more productive.

Gilman claimed that women and men have different qualities and energies. She said men’s energies were aggressive and had a tendency for self-expression, while women's, were maternal and more conservative. In history, lineage was traced from the mother because the men shared no responsibility of childcare. The need for monogamy came about in the need for men to keep track of their children in order to be able to pass down accumulations of wealth etc. Patriarchy developed with monogomy in that women became the main care takers of the children and had to depend on men to take care of them. There was also a need to bring men into the family life and become involved with their children and needed to adopt some maternal connections as the females. For this to happen, men were given power over women. Women were to depend on men instead of supporting themselves and their children. Since then, men became involved in the social network. Slowly the distinction between men and woman became extreme and started causing dysfunctions. She listed four major dysfunctions of patriarchy: Most of the dysfunctions stem from women's dependency on men. Because women needed to have a man for survival they had to become the attractor. From these dysfunctions, women became alienated from society.In her explanation of gynaecocentric theory, she claimed that women are the head of the species or of race and that patriarchy changed the economy’s social connection with women. Gilman does not claim that patriarchy was a bad phenomena but necessary for capitalism. She saw its function, but that it started to create more of a dysfunction later in its course. She saw the women movement as part of the evolving process of society.
 * sex became too important than it needed to be.
 * women became focused on adornment (with their bodies and jewelry)
 * women began to have an unhealthy attachment to men.
 * women became no productive consumers.

Dubois deals with how race is perceived in society. Du Bois talked of how the oppressed view themselves as not being in their world but in terms of being in another’s world. He talks about how African American's have a "second sight" because they live in two worlds, the white world surrounds them and their own culture. This is how he develops his concept of double consciousness. People see other people through stereotypes or how they perceive them. He explains that discrimination is an important function. It helps us to define right and wrong. He gives the example of how we would be prejudiced about having a criminal in our home and that in this case it is good to have the stereotype that criminals could be harmful. He explained that we put people in categories and place expectations on them, stereotypes. The down side to stereotyping is when they dominate our social interactions with an entire group of people. He explained how representation of person’s race turns into a stereotype of how one perceives that race and how the one being represented starts to label themselves with how one that one race/person perceives them. Along with this they are also conscious of how their perceives them (a double consciousness). Du Bois also theorized about how a culture that is oppressed culturally will be oppressed economically. Allan says" Dubois sees race as a tool of capitalism" (163). Capitalism exploits people and those of certain races will be exploited more than others due to their current cultural oppression.