GGR313: Exploring Gender Roles and the City Landscape - Fall 2017

This essay, written for GGR313, examines the influence of gender on urban landscapes, focusing on the shifts in gender roles within Canadian society, particularly since the Women's Liberation Movement. It explores how landscapes reflect and shape gender dynamics, referencing historical con...Read More

GGR313: Gender and the City Fall 2017
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Introduction
It is now close to over forty years since the onset of Women’s Liberation Movement.
Markedly, over this time, a lot of changes have occurred which have impacted on women: from
the workplace as well as classroom; the athletic field and the home front; on letterhead to the law
books, today women have a totally different perception and concept of themselves as well as
their role in our societies as compared to their views before 1970s. In a similar way, landscape as
a subject of study, has made wide steps toward greater equality in the recent past decades as well
as towards a new recognition of the attachments between environment and social issues. Indeed,
this has been and still is appropriate time to look into the influence of gender on landscape –
extending from a design profession through an academic discipline to it being a subculture
having its own history (Prentice, 2002).
Landscape as commonly known refers to a piece of scenery that is viewed from a lookout
point. However, in human geography, the concept of landscape is a bit different. The Landscapes
are taken to be the areas that have socially-created unity resulting from the built environment
including the roads, buildings, incorporation of natural landforms as well as signs) and people’s
behaviors within and through that environment as well as the meanings they ascribe to those
environments. Elements in a landscape include: unity, scale, form, texture, colour, variety,
balance as well as line. The expressions of these in various landscapes can be under the influence
of gender and can as well impact on how the gender can dictate the roles played by men and
women. (Mackey, 2000).).
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Discussion
Most familiar landscapes in Canada currently depict a mixture of roles played by both
men and women. The various connections seen between sexuality and gender roles to some
significant extent are complex. In fact, historians to date continue to debate on this issue.
Gender-defined roles, approached as shifting cultural as well as social responses to sexual
differences, show consistent historical powers as well as categories that link the body to
ethnicity, age and class. The Better Life Index released in 2014 by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicates that Canadian women, on average,
spend about 254 minutes daily cleaning, cooking and caring for children as well. In comparison,
men spend 160 minutes on average to perform similar tasks (Mackey, 2000).
Figure 1: Female Australian pilot
The women have taken male dominated careers such as pilot as in figure 1. The 21st
century gender trends are historically deeply rooted in gender roles as defined and dictated by
patriarchy more than by partnership in equal measures. Histories marked with the fight for the
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rights of women as well as gendering of experience are among the means challenging and
possibly bringing to the end such persistent norms. As of today more than ever before, these
confrontations with histories marked with inequality are common in official policies as well as
legislation which appreciate still-wider ideologies of gender as well as identity (Plamer, 2009).
Figure 2: Australian females in armed forces
Conversely, the changing of historic restrictions and roles into postmodern setting up of
gender roles in Canada is not only a landscape of change but is as well strongly attached to the
continuity of transformation. The Australian military has seen many women joining air forces as
well as navy to help in keeping peace. As observed by Bryan Palmer, the first decade postwar
generation, the turbulent sixties, came along a “generation gap” in gender roles as well as mores
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between Canadian young men and young women as seen in other parts of the world (Palmer,
2009).
Unifying gender roles in the setup of homemaker mothers and bread-winner fathers
became one of the postwar projects in Canada with the aim of rebuilding and thus restructuring
the Canadian society as well as its economy. The efforts put forward towards a unified gender as
depicted in the pictures above have been taken to form part of a search for a relative prosperity
and security by a generation affected directly by the depression and Second World War. To
majority of Canadian population, gender normalcy may have been forced from the top but it was
indeed as well appreciated from below (Rutherdale, 2010).
A close look in the historical records of gender roles, behaviors as well as sexuality
clearly indicates a pattern, more complex, of continuing transformation and as well depicts that
traditional gender roles are of themselves, transitory.
Conclusion
The re-mapping and restructuring of gender roles followed by the fall of Nazism and as the cold
war loomed in between 1914 and 1939, can be taken and as well approached to be a generational
and as well a gendered social historical script. Normalization of gendered roles thus brought men
and women, mothers and fathers to seek for a “home” as both a private life aspiration as well as a
public-realm cultural ideal. In such a normalized social landscape both genders can perform all
roles comfortably without any form of discrimination ( Palmer, 2009 ).
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References
1. Mackey E., (2000). Death by Landscape. Race, Nature and Gender in Canadian Nationalist
Mythololgy .(20)2
2. Palmer B.,(2009). Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era. University of
Toronto Press: Toronto
3. Prentice H K., (2002). A Century of Women: Evaluating Gender in Landsacpe Architecture.
(22)2. University of California: Berkeley.
4. Rutherdale R., (2010). Gendered Roles after the Wars. (10)7. Agloma University.
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