The Biologic Basis for Sex Role Stereotypes

MOST SOCIETIES HAVE TO SOME extent delineated characteristic roles for the males and females to follow. Such role stereotypes serve as models for little girls and boys during their development, and their function is generally to ensure that the work and reproduction necessary for continuance of that culture are accomplished. To the extent that role stereotypes provide security and stability, they can be useful; to the extent that they limit potentialities, they can be damaging. Sex role stereotypes that helped to build a technological society out of prerevolutionary America may be irrelevant or even dangerous to a society imperiled by overpopulation, nuclear warfare, and pollution. Thus in recent years a women's movement and a spate of literature have appeared that reexamine the sex role stereotypes in the light of the needs of modern American society.

The popular art produced by a culture is indicative of the sex role stereotypes and thus if we examine advertisements, popular literature, soap operas, etc. we see that the ideal American woman is nurturant, passive, receptive, giving, intuitive, emotional, weak; she is poor at science and intellectual abstraction and mathematics; she might be artistic but never achieves greatness in creative endeavors, nor does she aspire to do so; she takes tremendous pains to be physically attractive according to evanescent ideals of feminine beauty, to achieve which she may be driven to self-mutilation, as by starving herself to skeletal dimensions or bleaching the life out of her hair or destroying her carriage with