The American Dream Gender Analysis

The “American Dream” is a lifestyle ideal that attracts people from all over the world. This ideal is that in America, everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve success, homeownership, and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. However, even with hard work, determination, and initiative, obstacles can arise that can impede one’s achieving of this success. Gender, socioeconomic class, education, and traditional culture can influence peoples’ pursuit of the “American Dream”. Gender plays an important role in the pursuit of the “American Dream”, but more importantly, gender bias plays a key role in woman’s pursuit of the “American Dream”. Primarily, women are viewed as the homemakers of the family, even if maintaining …show more content…
A person or family’s socioeconomic class can affect achieving this goal. Barbara and John Ehrenreich discuss the collapse of the middle class during the Great Recession in their article The Making of the American 99% and The Collapse of the Middle Class. It is suggested that race and ethnicity played an even bigger role in the loss of homeownership during 2007-2008. “African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed.”(Ehrenreich). The obstacles of economic recessions and being targetted by one’s race can create great obstacles that make owning a home seem nearly impossible. “People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society...people trapped in a culture of tenancy do …show more content…
Education is often seen as the gateway to success. It is seen as unfair when a child born into a wealthy family has great education opportunities than that of a child born below the poverty line. With the job market being as highly competitive as it is, for a people without college educations it can be even more difficult to find well-paying jobs than those with a college education. If a person is uneducated and is working a minimum wage paying job, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve the lifestyle that is the “American Dream”, to escape poverty and to thrive economically. Being uneducated also comes with a stigma, that being uneducated makes a person lesser than a person that does have an education. This can make a person feel as if they have no chance of achieving upward mobility or even just improving their quality of life. This attitude gravely impedes on a persons strive towards achieving their “American