Gender Roles- Rough Draft

Society has always had the idea that there has to be some kind of gender role in the world. The idea that men are more powerful than women and that men are more equipped to work while the women either work on their looks or stay at home cooking, cleaning, caring for the children and all around making the men happy. Tennessee Williams portrays this gender role in both of his plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie to support his point that there is a “role” that everyone must live up to. In each of the plays there are two women characters that support the gender role idea, even though the four women are all different they each show a different kind of women roles that were present in the forties. The presence of gender roles in these two plays shows Tennessee Williams opinion on women along with helping the reader to see what women are and were all about.

In A Streetcar Named Desire the two main women characters are Blanche and Stella. These two women are key parts in the play and display how Tennessee Williams viewed women of the nineteen forties. “’Pig-polak-disgusting- vulgar- greasy!’- Them kind of words have been on your [Stella’s] tongue and your sisters to much around here! What do you two think you are? A pair of Queens?” Not letting women use these kinds of words, which in today’s society are used by both men and women, is an example of how men viewed and treated women. Empowerment over women is a large theme in this play, along with many of Tennessee Williams other plays.

Laura and Amanda in The Glass Menagerie also portray women of the nineteen forties, but in a different way than Blanche and Stella do, showing the different types of women in the forties, giving the reader different prospective on women’s roles. In the play Laura’s job, according to Amanda is to “stay fresh and pretty- for gentlemen callers!”(1.14). Amanda’s plans for Laura are not based on a desire for her daughters happiness, but to fulfill the gender roles that she sees in the world around her. In her viewing this in the world around her it can be concluded that this is how women of the time period were expected to act.