Cole: Commonalities and Differences

This is an interesting challenge to the idea that all women are the same and takes a look at the ways in which culture, class, race, and gender (specifically femininity, it doesn’t really look at the experiences of men), intersect. One of the most interesting aspects of this for me was the recognition that women stereotype against other women based on their class, race, or other factors. It is interesting to me that most people are victims of stereotypes and yet still impose them on others. To me, this says that we as a culture choose not to recognize the power stereotypes have over us but instead accept them to some degree, as if both giving and receiving of this phenomenon sets the scales to even. After reading this I thought of some examples, for example working women stereotyping upper class women who play the suburban housewife role as snotty, lazy and materialistic while these upper class women might stereotype the working class women as, ironically enough, lazy or unintelligent. The strangest part is, these women likely put some of the same stereotypes on one another. For example, the working woman might say that the upper class woman is lazy because she doesn’t have a job, while the upper class woman might retort that the working class woman must be lazy or she would have a better job, or more money. These are pretty simplistic examples, but really show how wrapped up we are in all of stereotypes, to the point where we hardly notice them or their foolishness until they are holding us back. I’m really glad I got to read this and think about stereotypes in this way!