Gender Roles In To Kill A Mockingbird

The Role of Gender in To Kill A Mockingbird Women and Men are created equal, but are not always treated equally. In Harper Lee’s coming of age novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch, the main protagonist, is growing up in Maycomb, Alabama. In the book, Scout and her brother, Jem, grow up and find their place in the society in which they live. Throughout the novel, Scout learns things about herself, her community and her society. Scout changes from a little child to a girl who realizes that she can still become the “lady” that society expect her to be without abandoning who she is. Scout was a figure before her time. She represented the hope that Lee envisioned that girls and women would be treated better in the future. Scout connects …show more content…
Girls then stayed mostly inside and played with tea sets and dolls and were breed to have perfect deportment and for mother and wife hood. Scout does not let the fact that she is a girl stop her from doing the things she likes, or from doing things that one wouldn’t ordinarily expect of a girl, such as fighting, both physically and verbally,and standing up for herself when she feels she has been wronged. In today’s world, girls play many sports, contrary from the past and can be, more or less, whatever they want, though some gender expectations still exist. Currently, independence is seen as a valuable asset in women, and there is a small equality gap between men and women, although it still exists. In the time when the book was written, women were mostly housewives and rarely worked out of the home and wore mostly dresses and skirts. These behaviors, shown in To Kill a Mockingbird, and exercised by Scout’s aunt Alexandra and most other women in the novel and encouraged on Scout. But Scout responded to a remark from her aunt by saying, “...one can be a ray of sunshine in a pair of pants just as