Shakespeare Gender Roles

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Gender roles have differed over the years, and have definitely changed between Shakespeares’ time and 90’s when the movie 10 things I Hate About You was filmed. This difference in gender roles had a huge impact on how the movie turned out compared to the play. Kat or Katherine is one of if not the most important characters, as she goes through the most changes. She is also majorly influenced by her lover Petruchio, otherwise known as Patrick through both play and movie. Although how much she changed really depended on the cultural norm in the time, which finding evidence for isn’t hard. For example In the play she went from shrew to loyal wife, yet in the movie it only seems like she had opened up to Patrick, while
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In fact they increased their participation up to 60% in the workforce, while the men’s participation actually decreased. The women of the 90’s not only had an impact in the workforce but also in politics and pop culture. For once we can actually see women expressing their thoughts and emotions which we can see very clearly in kat’s speech “...but mostly I hate they way I don’t hate you, not even close, not even a little bit not even at all.” (“10 Things I Hate About You”) Meanwhile the women of shakespeare’s time were given less opportunities, they were limited on what they could actually do during the 15-1600s. So women took pride in being mothers, since it wasn’t that uncommon for a child to die of sickness. Since women took such pride in motherhood they had no real need for education, or so was the thought amongst the majority of men. Due to their limited education they could only be cooks or maids, but sometimes the daughters of richer families may have had private instructors to teach them a language, how to play a musical instrument, or even songs. If a woman was married she was expected to obey her husband no matter what. In the play Taming of the Shrew we see this fully expressed at the end with Katherine 's rant where she says,” A woman owes her husband the same loyalty a subject owes his king.” (Shakespeare, 5.2. …show more content…
Starting in the 90s, women could actually hold decent jobs and made a higher percentage of money per hour. Because of this society’s view on both men and women’s gender roles changed and so many questions were asked. Such as the age old question, who should pay for dinner, and who should make the first move? We can see this in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You when Kat and Patrick are in her car and after saying,”You know, you 're not as vile as I thought you were” (“10 Things I Hate About You”) and goes for a kiss, but is turned down by Patrick. So just by that we can see that it’s socially acceptable for a girl to make a move, but had that been set in shakespeare’s time it would have turned out very differently. What was acceptable for women in shakespeare 's was so strict in fact an unmarried woman could almost never be around a guy alone, she was required to have a chaperone. To further this unless she was your fiance there was to be practically no physical contact, not even holding hands. Which surprisingly goes hand in hand with the play when Petruchio announces that Katherine is to be his wife ,”So kiss me, Kate. We’re to be married on Sunday.”(Shakespeare, 2.1.

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