Preteens Think They Know Everything But Really It's Just Hormones

""Scout, I'm tellin' you for the last time, shut your trap or go home--I declare to the Lord you're gettin' more like a girl every day!"" (69)

"After one altercation when Jem hollered, "It's time you started bein' a girl and acting right!" I burst into tears and fled to Caplurnia." (153)

This is going to be a patriarchy/oppression blog so be prepared for that (but it works because the patriarchy is a form of oppression).

In the first quote, Jem is talking to Scout to get her to stop talking when she was trying to explain what she was feeling to Jem and Dill (she didn't want to go near the Radley house). They did not listen to her and instead, Jem insisted that she stopped acting like a girl and be more "boyish" so they could have fun and irritate the neighbors.

However, in the second quote, Jem yells at Scout to get her to act more "girlish." Although the book doesn't tell us exactly what caused him to say that, it did give us enough information to infer that he began adopting the "proper" way that things should be. This mimics the events that occurred on page 108 when Aunt Alexandra basically tells Scout that she needed to be more lady-like.

All of this talk of acting more or less like a girl or a boy irritates me a lot. First of all, it contradicts itself. As Jem grows older he is exposed to more things that may make him more judgmental (in the book it says he "had acquired an alien set of values"), and honestly younger Jem seems like a cooler person than preteen Jem. Secondly, he is being oppressive. He is pushing the expectation of women in society onto his sister, and that's not okay, because she should be able to do whatever she wants. This isn't completely his fault, because his society told him to and he probably wants to fit in, but he should still be more open-minded.

This trend of patriarchy has always been around and occurs in most societies and, though people think it has stopped (which is why a bunch of people hate feminism and think it is useless), the patriarchy is still very much alive and influences pay to the different genders and their "roles" in society.