Strictly-defined gender roles are prevalent throughout Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel presents these gender roles through Scout’s conversations with other boys. When talking with her brother, Jem, about her reluctance to disobey their father’s request to stop dramatizing the life of Boo Radley, Jem tells her that she “was being a girl, that girls imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so . . .” (45). Similarly, after Jem retrieves a tire from the Radley Place that Scout could not out of fear, he gloats, “I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’” (42). Both these quotes from Jem highlight the roles that girls were expected to follow: in the eyes of many, they were looked down upon for being a cowardly [thing] and an imaginative gossip. Though Scout—and, presumably, many other
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Upon realizing the shallow extent of the new Dewey Decimal System, Scout ponders, “I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something” (37). Scout hints that she is an intelligent girl who is destined to be more than just a homemaker, a role that women were expected to hold while the men worked “real” jobs. Beginning to realize the path society is nudging her towards, she is already starting to challenge this authority through her own reading and education with her father, Atticus. Furthermore, Scout responds to Jem and Dill’s casting her out, saying to them, “This yard’s as much mine as it is yours, Jem Finch. I got just as much right to play in it as you have” (51). She knows that such treatment is unfair, and wants no part of it. They are not so different, after all, so why should Scout stand for
Upon realizing the shallow extent of the new Dewey Decimal System, Scout ponders, “I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something” (37). Scout hints that she is an intelligent girl who is destined to be more than just a homemaker, a role that women were expected to hold while the men worked “real” jobs. Beginning to realize the path society is nudging her towards, she is already starting to challenge this authority through her own reading and education with her father, Atticus. Furthermore, Scout responds to Jem and Dill’s casting her out, saying to them, “This yard’s as much mine as it is yours, Jem Finch. I got just as much right to play in it as you have” (51). She knows that such treatment is unfair, and wants no part of it. They are not so different, after all, so why should Scout stand for