The House On Mango Street Gender Roles

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros takes place in the 1980 in a poor Chicago Latino neighborhood. The reader reads a series of vignettes from Esperanza's point of view. She has moved around her whole life and is trying to find a place to fit in in the world even though she doesn't think she fits in in her new neighborhood. Through the vignettes there are clearly defined gender roles that happen and they pick out the women as the weak ones who need to stay at home and the men who have so much more power over women and can beat their children for really no good reason. As a result, women are treated poorly and have a hard time in their neighborhood while men have all the strength and run the neighborhood.
This greatly affects …show more content…
Because of her heritage as a Latina girl they have very defined gender roles. In one of the vignettes, Hips, Esperanza, Rachel, Lucy, and Nenny talk about what women's hips are used for. For example, some of them said girls use hips for dancing, while some of them added comments saying if you don't have hips you're more like a man. One comment by Rachel that stood out to Esperanza was when she said "They're good for holding a baby when you're cooking" (Cisneros 49). Esperanza doesn't agree with this statement as the reader can tell when she comments saying "(Rachel) has no imagination" (Cisneros 49). This clearly defines a gender role for women because even as young teens they already are saying that there body was made the way it was made so they could stay at home, cook, and take care of kids at the same time. Esperanza though knows there is more to the world and thinks she doesn't fit in with the people that live in her neighborhood. She doesn't think that women should be treated like this but Rachel growing up in her environment where there are these gender roles that define who a person can be even if it's only a person who carries around there kid all day and holds it on their hip while they cook. This affects the young characters in the story because since they already believe that there roles are defined in their society by what gender you are they can't see that it …show more content…
In this vignette the reader hears about how Sally's father beats her “like she was an animal” (Cisneros 92). In this time period women can't do anything about what happens to them because the men have so much more power over them. They can hurt women for just talking to another man. “One day Sally's father catches her talking to a boy and the next day she doesn't come to school. And the next… he just forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt” (Cisneros 93). The gender roles of a man and women are polar opposites in this book. Women are supposed to stay at home, take care of kids, cook, and behave in ways that you wouldn't think about today like not talking to other men or even if you're 12 not talking to boys your age. On the other hand men are rageful people who hurt people when they don't do what they are supposed to. The reader can see that men have so much more ability to hurt women in this book and it greatly affects the characters because it causes people like Sally to grow up in a society like this and think it is normal for this to happen to them. This will continue to happen because of the strength men have over women because the women are too scared of the men to come forward in the story and say something to stop it. We can see that the men's roles in the story are to be the abusing, powerful, frightful people that will continue to get away with what