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 a evolutionist one who believes that society is a like a mechanism which evolves like simple cells to a more complex ones and like cells society evolves from simple systems to more complex as society finds way to survive by relying on one another. In this chapter, Allen explains how animals are affected by their natural surroundings and they change to adapt to their environment and it was also the case with humans until they became an organized society and began to be influenced by its social structures that formed (p 141). Gilman saw this new social structure as the economy. In order for society to survive, humans developed an economy. Her theory of alienation occurs with gender roles within the economy. In her explanation of the economy, she talks about there is 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 where balanced than capitalism would function. To keep these two principles in equilibrium between each other society developed laws and culture (p.144). She claimed that patriarchy became a dysfunction because it created a flaw in individuals’ survivability. Capitalism created patriarchy so that society could become more complex than just simple as in male and female energies. Men’s energy was aggressive and had a tendency for self-expression. Women, on the other hand, were maternal instinctively. The lineage was traced from the mother because the men shared no responsibility with their young. 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. In order to bring men into the family life and become involved with their children, they need to adopt some maternal connections as the females. For this to happen, men were given power over the women. Women were to depend on him instead of supporting themselves and their children. Since then, men became involved in the social network. Slowly the distinction between men and woman came to become extreme and cause dysfunctions. Gilman explained that women were no longer apart of the economic production. Along with this she listed for major dysfunctions of patriarchy which are sex became too important than it needed to be, women now focused on adornment (with their bodies and jewelry), women had began an unhealthy attachment to men, and lastly women became no productive consumers. By these dysfunctions, women became alienated from society. Gilman does not claim that patriarchy was a bad phenomena but necessary for capitalism. She saw its function, but 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. As Gilman dealt with patriarchy, Du Bois talked about gender. Du Bois talked of how the oppress view themselves as not in their world but in terms of being in another’s world. How people see other people is through stereotypes or how he perceive them as being. Stereotyping is important in avoiding bad company such as criminals. He explained that we put people in categories and place expectations on them. 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 the one being represented starts to label themselves how one that one race perceives them. Along with this they are also conscience of how they perceive themselves, a double conscience. Du Bois also theorized how a culture that is oppressed culturally will be oppressed economically.