Agents of socialization in society

¶ … macro and micro influences on the writer's life. Rather than use an autobiographical essay this paper presents a sociological look at life through the experiences of the writer throughout life.

Macro sociology is the study of large groups and/or whole societies.

When I was a very small child I remember going to preschool. I was very excited to go because my older brother had gone and he had come home every day and shared the details of his experience with me. I was ready by the time September rolled around. I remember racing into the classroom to discover the world that I had been missing out on the previous year when I was stopped at the door by the teacher.

She told me that ladies did not run and that we were to conduct ourselves with dignity.

That affected my mind and feelings in a macro sense as it provided me with an early framework about what was expected of me as a young woman, at least from this very tall, and older teacher's standpoint.

Later on during that first week I encountered another example of macro effect through the gender issues at preschool when all of the little girls were playing with the house area of the room. It was a little area set up to provide fun in pretending to cook, iron and other household duties.

I remember I went to the other side of the room where the little boys were playing with trucks. I chose a bright red fire truck, because my aunt is a fire fighter and I sat down to play when an older boy took the truck away from me and told me that I should go play house with the girls.

Both of these instances affected from a macro standpoint as it helped me define who I was in society, though it was a negative picture.

At that point in my young life I was educated that women belong in the kitchen and that women like my aunt, who I had always been proud of for being a firefighter was not a normal woman and was in fact someone I needed to be ashamed of.

When it came to the micro impact that it had on me I know it was an intense one. I had always been encouraged at home to be and do whatever I wanted.

There were no gender roles and I was not expected to play with dolls any more than my brother was expected to play with trucks, however, this preschool experience was so important to me that I was easily led to believe that my place within the class group was to be a little girl and not cross the barriers set by society with regard to gender.

Church held much the same types of messages for me. At our church I remember going to the preschool Sunday school and being told I was to grow up to become a Methodist maiden while my brother was set to be a Royal Ranger.

These were similar to scout names and the differences were subtle. They definitely were gender biased and divided girls and boys to become little housewives and rulers of the world.

The one area in which I was not indoctrinated to the gender differences at a young age was socializing outside of preschool. I was invited to birthday parties and other events of both boys and girls with equal regularity. I don't think I was ever told I was not invited because of my gender. This affected me in a macro way with a positive spin as it placed a small spark of hope within my heart that boys and girls were indeed equal after all.

EARLY SCHOOL YEARS

During my early school years I was provided the opportunity to excel because I was academically gifted. When I entered first grade I was allowed to go into the third grade reading group in a third grade classroom.

This impacted me in several ways from a sociological standpoint. At the early grade levels being smart is something to be proud of.

I was given special treatment because of my advanced reading ability and I was taught through that experience that it was a positive aspect of life to be able to read so well. My first grade friends believed that I knew much more than I did because of the fact that I was allowed to go to another classroom for my reading and several third grade students would invite me to play with them on the playground during recess.

From a macro viewpoint of society I learned that being smart or advanced provided advantages and I am embarrassed to admit it made me believe that smart people were better than people of lesser intelligence or academic ability.

I think it is possible that coming out of my preschool experience where I was pretty much shuffled into a preconceived mindset of who I should b and how I should think based on my gender alone I was so happy to be able to excel at something that the idea shaped my belief about society in general.

That macro effectiveness made its way across most areas of my life. When I went to Sunday school that year and the teacher discovered my ability to read she too treated me differently. Suddenly I was the teacher's pet and asked to help teach the class by reading the lessons out loud.

I felt that again, people who read well were smart and smart people were given better opportunities in life than not so smart individuals were. I developed an attitude that I could only associate with my equals and this caused me to miss out on may friends during my early childhood school years. I refused to play with those who were not in specialized groups for reading.

My family did not treat me as different based on then fact that I could read well. In fact I remember my mother telling me several times that everybody has gifts and talents and I needed to focus on appreciating the talents of others instead of dismissing them out of hand.

The ability to read well did get me treated differently by school administrators however, and it created a mindset for me that advanced equals superior in many areas, not just the one academic area of advancement. I fully believed at that young age that I would grow up to be extremely successful based on my advanced reading ability.

It was not long however, before I was taken down a few notches.

The media fed into my early formation and macro affect when it came to my school abilities. Each year they would broadcast the national spelling bee winner, the national history bee winner and other children who were extraordinary in their abilities in school. It provided me with validation for my beliefs that I belonged to an elite set of young people who would go on to cure the worst diseases, and take care of the world in ways that average readers could not hope to do.

It was during these early school years that I realized gender did not make the difference, but ability is where the difference between good and bad was provided by society.

Wow were my eyes later opened.

ADOLESCENCE

As an adolescent I was forced into several realities from a sociological viewpoint as my gender became important not only to the general scheme of life but also in my gifted abilities in school.

As I entered the years of middle school I had begun to pride myself on not only being intelligent but on keeping up with the boys in all academic areas. Because of my early indoctrination into life with regard to gender roles it had become important to me to compete and beat the males in my classroom.

Whether it was reading, history, spelling or math I was excelling for the purposes of proving that girls and boys are in fact equal.

My family life did nothing to argue that point. I was always treated with respect and dignity. There were no female or make chores in my house. I was told to take out the trash and my brother was told to do the dishes. In fact we believed that the only division of chores in hour house was that adults did not have to do them as long as they had children to do them instead.

My father had been a school teacher and my mother was a biologist. I am sure that played in part some of the responsibility for us being raised that gender equality should be a given. My mother graduated from college in a field that had been make dominated since its inception and she excelled at what she did. She was able to succeed in an industry that barely recognized females and she was able to become a supervisor during an era in which women were usually paid less.

My father was a school teacher during a time when females dominated the profession. They still do. Through my adolescent years I received conflicting messages as teachers tried to push me to excel in the academic areas that society deems acceptable for women, while discouraging me from things that were usually considered men territories.

On a macro level this taught me that my family was strange and I remember for a short period of time flipping the roles my parents played in the work world. I would tell others that my father was the biologist and my mother was the teacher. I believed it fit more with what the structure of society expected from a normal family and I was at an age where being a normal family was of utmost importance.

My friends at the time also fed into the gender difference beliefs as they began to eye the football team and cheerleading tryouts based solely on gender.

I had a friend named Bobby. Bobby was a boy who wanted very much to be a cheerleader. I happened to be at his house the day he announced this at the dinner table and the explosion will never leave my memory. His father called him names that H. had never heard come out of the mouth of an adult, met alone a father toward his son and he was told that I had to go home and he could not have me over again as it was about time he began socializing with men not women.

When I got home I was visibly shaken and my parents put me in the car and went to Bobby's house to discuss their treatment of me with the parents.

It was at that time that my macro sense when into overtime as I could see the writing on the wall. It happened exactly as I believed it would once the father of that family found out that my mother was a scientist and my dad was a teacher.

Let's just say that we left and I was told by my parents to never associate with that family again expect for Bobby at school.

In a micro way I was affected even more deeply as I found myself associating primarily with females and shunning the boys who had once been my friends. I felt dirty and ashamed as if I had somehow caused the problem with Bobby's family and I wanted to be sure I was never responsible for something like that again. I was going to be a girl if it killed me.

It was also during this time that the media caught my attention. Because I wanted to become a journalist during my middle school years I found myself paying close attention to the print media and the bylines that went with it. I found that several bylines in our local paper were female names and it excited me to no end to discover this was a profession in which women were allowed and apparently treated as equals.

This impacted me from a macro standpoint as I realized there was one small corner of the world in which women were in fact considered to be equal to men.

It was during this time in my life when my entire family converted to the practice of Catho9losicm. Talk about a macro gender shock! My entire life had been spent in the Methodist church. In this church there are not many female leaders but there are some and those who became pastors were treated with same respect and dignity that the men were afforded. We had a female pastor in our church for years before she left and Pastor Mike took over.

I am not sure why my parents decided we needed to explore the Catholic faith but they did and it had a significant impact on me from both a macro and micro standpoint.

The Catholic Church is probably the most sexist faith on earth. The men are allowed to become priests while women are only allowed to become nuns. For my entire life I had been fighting against a macro standpoint being forced upon me about a woman's place compared to a man's place and here I was in a faith that divided the genders into football and cheerleaders all over again.

A rebelled. I was angry. I spent every Sunday morning asking my mother how she could sell out the way she did, she a woman of science taking me to a church that insisted if I wanted to devote my life to God's work I must do it in a skirt called a habit and if my brother wanted to become a man of God he would be allowed to lead the church as a priest.

It angered me beyond words and I was shocked by my mother's conversion. The time spent in the Catholic Church during these years had a grave impact on me from a macro standpoint as I saw what society, at least Catholic society thought of women as compared to men and I was not happy.

When I became an adult I was allowed to be free of this faith and went to a faith that accepted all men and women as equals. I returned to the Methodist fold however, it was not as equal as my childlike memories had led me to believe it was.

When I arrived home to my faith I was ready to be embraced for being the open minded, gender savvy woman I believed myself to be however, I was disappointed to find that even in this faith there are gender divisions that cannot be ignored. We were expected to go to the women retreats where we would be taught to be better wives and helpmates to our husbands when we married, while the men were off learning how to better serve the Lord and control and run their families.

A loved the church but balked against being told that I must be subservient to my man.

Again my attitude from a macro sense was impacted because at this point it felt that every world religion divided men and women and the women got the short end of the stick.

I had spent my life fighting against such stereotyping but realized that I had been taught this from the day I entered preschool and had been fighting against it since that day.

I was tired, I was angry and I found myself refusing to go to church. I also realized that I had played into it while in high school when I let guidance counselors talk me into staying away from the math majors and working toward excelling in the world of literature.

I was appalled to look back and see how I had supported society's discrimination of women by my actions and decided as I entered college to change the world.

Imagine my surprise when I got to college and found I was fighting a non-existent battle.

My college experience helped to undo all of the years of macro insistence that men and women were to be treated differently.

It helped me to realize that it was not a bad society but poorly educated or underdeveloped individuals that I had been dealing with all of those years.

In college I was exploring my interests and nobody told me I should ignore certain areas because of my gender. After a lifetime of fighting an uphill battle I was finally allowed to be me and not be ashamed or told I was not normal because of who I was.

My macro sense was finally able to view the world as people without gender, however, I was old enough and wise enough to understand that this was a campus experience and out in the real world of work and adults there were still many issues that were unresolved.

My micro sense brought me to a place in which I was no longer the rebel and I was able to stop trying to prove myself and instead able to just be who I am and enjoy the interaction.

My family had left the Catholic Church and returned to the Methodist faith and I was once again proud of my mother's actions, profession and abilities.

All seemed right with the world from most corners however, in my work life things remained at odds.

WORK LIFE

When I began school I decided to get a job and supplement the funds my parents were providing. I wanted more spending money and if I wanted more they told me it was up to me to earn it. The first position I got was in a restaurant. I was a waitress. As a waitress I had many duties to fulfill. I had to serve, clean tables ring up customers and greet them at the door as they came in. It was the first place in my life that I experienced gender differences in a positive fashion.

A there were both female and male wait staff and we used to have contests to see who could make the most cash in tips by the end of the shift. It never failed. The women always made more than the men.

It became our own little experiment to see how differently the genders were treated. I am embarrassed to say that some of my customers got poor service in my quest to test this theory. We would purposely have the females provide less standards of service to the customers than our male counterparts would provide and at the end of the shift we still made more than they did in tips.

We could not understand this but figured it had to do with male hormones and female waitresses. On a deeper more macro level we also accepted the idea that society as a whole expected more out of men than becoming waiters therefore did not respect the males they encountered in the restaurant.