Introduction
My name is Faith Leonard. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee on June 7, 2001, to my parents Jeff and Michelle Bartlett. Since this day, society marked me as a person of the female gender. When I was born, I was given an ascribed status, which was being a Caucasian female. From that moment on, my parents used my sex and social labels to make decisions about how I would dress and act. Although it was obvious to say that I was a little girl, I was always dressed in pink or purple by my grandmother. Pink is typically a color that is usually associated with the female gender. I always played with toys for little girls, such as My Little Pony, Barbie, and play makeup. Performing these actions as a little girl, overshadowed my childhood and helped me act how I was taught a girl was supposed to act. There are many socialization agents in my life, being certain individuals in my life like my birth parents to life events that have influenced my personality. Based on the ideas of C. Wright Mills, he believed that sociology describes the intersection among records and biography is that I will examine how elements of my lifestyle, including tradition, race, gender, class, and faith, have affected occasions in my life and feature connected them to larger sociological establishments and cultures.
Biography
I was born in Nashville, Tennessee in June 2001. I was taken away from my birth parents when I was just 8 months old. My aunt had to come to get me or I would have been put in foster care, so that is when I moved to Cullman, Alabama. I have come to realize that the community in that I was raised molded me into the person I am today. I grew up in Cullman, Alabama. Living there, I was mainly around white people. I never experienced any racial problems, simply because Cullman used to be predominantly white. I lived with my aunt and uncle until I was 5 years old, and that is when they divorced. My uncle owned the house, so I and my aunt had to move in with my grandma. Being taken away from my parents and my aunt’s divorce are just two things that had an impact on me growing up. I felt as if I never really knew where I would end up, also I never had a steady home until I moved in with my adopted family at 9 years old. Also, I started to encounter age-related transition points that require socialization into a new role, such as starting kindergarten. Kids are sent to school at a young age, making school an early form of socialization. The school's purpose is to teach life skills and knowledge we will need for the rest of our lives. A few months later, my dad got out of jail and moved in with us. About two months after that, my mom got out of jail. My parents got their place and I lived with them. It was hell, to say the least. My parents were very abusive, I was even put in the hospital for 3 months because of my injuries. When I got out of the hospital, I went to live with my aunt and her new boyfriend.
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A few months in, they start arguing all the time. My aunt told me she did not want me in that type of situation anymore. Then one day when I was in second grade, she came and got me from school. My aunt told me I had to stay with her friend while she went to the doctor. I was there for almost a year, and she never came back. This was traumatic to me. I was in a new home and did not know anyone there. I soon found out it was a foster home. After that year, the woman who adopted my two brothers before I was born, wanted to adopt me too. I eventually moved in with them and was officially adopted by the time I was 9 years old. My real dad passed away a few months later.
The next year, I started middle school. This is where I felt like there was the main location of the importance of adult obedience. I learned that when someone else is talking and waiting for my turn, I have to be quiet. I mainly have seen this with my coaches, if my cheer coach had to tell my team something, we better not say anything or interrupt her while she was talking.
During middle school, I cheered and was on the math team, scholar’s bowl, basketball, and softball teams. I also played travel softball. I considered these social groups that gave me a sense of belonging and identity. My identity was not an orphan but rather an athlete and a member of several other clubs. My foster parents grew up going to church, and so, therefore, did I after I was adopted. We attended Temple Baptist Church in Cullman. Symbolic Interactionism is the view of social behavior emphasizing verbal or gestural communication and its subjective meaning, in particular, the role of language in the creation of children as social entities. In Christianity, we refer to the cross as a sign of Jesus Christ's love for us and our faith in Jesus Christ as well. I attended church almost every Wednesday night and Sunday. I was very involved in the Children’s Ministry. I was a member in the 4th grade until my senior year. Starting my freshman year, I volunteered with my mother, she was a youth leader, and I helped her with small groups and crowd control as she taught. I consider these examples of my self-identities.
Then, I started high school. This is where social groups came into action. Your social group was based on what sports you played and what clubs you were in. Normally all cheerleaders were in the same social group, the same for football players. I was also on the math team and scholar’s bowl. I even placed 7th in the state math tournament when I was in 10th grade. Starting my junior year, I attended Wallace State Community College. There I was accepted into the FastTrack program, which was basically like dual enrollment, except I went to the community college full-time for classes instead of my high school.
Once I started attending Wallace State Community College, I have seen a lot of differences in how students who did FastTrack were treated versus the other students at my high school. This happened mainly because of the high school staff, especially the principal. They were completely against the program and did not think it was “fair.” I was also still a cheerleader at this point. Me and a friend of mine and I also cheered and did FastTrack and started seeing more inequality in this aspect of our lives too. We had a class that lasted until 2 pm and Wallace was 35 minutes from our high school. Cheer practice was supposed to start at 2 pm, and so our principal told our cheer coach it was not fair that we were not there the full time of practice every day, so he told her she needed to make us run to “punish” us because we were not there at the beginning of practice. I and my friend thought this was ridiculous because we were late because of a class, that we tried to get changed at the beginning of the year. We could not get the class changed because there was no other way unless it was taking a class at 5 pm and that would not work for basketball season or just cheer practices because that lasted 2-6 pm Monday through Thursday. A few weeks later this all ended because my parents were really upset and talked to the Superintendent of Cullman County, which was my mom’s good friend, and he told my principal that we could not be punished because it was a mandatory class for our graduation.
In March 2019 I went to Paris, France. It was the best trip I have ever been on. We explored and learned so much about the culture there. In May 2019, I graduated from Wallace State with my Associate’s in Science 3 weeks before I graduated from high school. I also received 3 scholarships from UAB, which has helped out a lot. I worked the whole summer at a local restaurant in my hometown and also babysit my nephew. I worked hard and saved money so I would have it when I moved to UAB. In August 2019, I moved to Birmingham.
History
In this section, I will talk about how I interviewed my sister, 32 years old, and my mother, 54 years old. I first interviewed my mom, and this is what she told me. When she was a child, there was very little technology. Televisions had rabbit ears or had an outside antenna that only received local 4 channels. Televisions mainly started becoming popular when she got into college. Personal computers were not something anyone could afford in 1979, so they did not have them. My mother also did not have a laptop to work on in college, she only had books and her lecture notes.
Another thing my mom has discussed with me was that gender equality had gotten better as she grew older. Women could apply for any job and go to school. It was not always like this. Women were still discriminated against thought, for example, they could not run companies. Women were expected to work, take care of children, and keep the house clean. If a woman was aggressive it was frowned upon supposed to believe that men were the only ones that could be the boss. Throughout her life, she said she has seen where it was still hard for men to accept women as being at a higher level than you or equal.
Next, my mom talked about social class. She told me that it was starting to change. White people still thought that they were superior to other races. Living in Cullman County, it was mainly white people and there were not many other races in the small town at the time. My mother told me that she had the first black teacher at her school in 1967 and his son Oscar was the first black child to attend her school. There were very few races but white in her community growing up. Oscar’s mom taught kindergarten with my mother’s mom, and she told me they were good friends. The head start program had just been started to give underprivileged children a better chance to compete with other kids. She told me that they hired the parents of poor families to work, like her parents. This allowed my mother’s family to double their income and help her to be better prepared to start the first grade. When she was little, her family was very poor. My mother also mentioned how black children were not allowed to swim with white children when she was little. When I was around 12 years old saw this began to change a lot. Some jobs were opening for blacks and white people starting to be better educated it was considered very important to be educated.
My mother also told me school was not like how it is now. Kids could smoke at school, and there were a lot fewer rules back then than now. Another thing she mentioned was that when she was in high school, there was not a lot of bullying and hardly any cliques. In her opinion, high schools now are so much worse and contain many more problems with bullying and harassment than back then. When she was a child, she had gone to cotton fields to help pick cotton with her grandfather. Her family could not afford machinery, so they had to do it by hand and put the cotton into sacks. She would go to gin with him to take the cotton that was collected that day. At 12, she planted peas and potato slips and helped harvest these to make money. At 15 years old, she got her first job as Burger Chef. When she was 19 and attending college was an assistant manager a Jack's. My mom also told me that her mother didn’t drive, so when her dad passed away when she was 19, my mother had to stay in Cullman to go to nursing school instead of going to physical therapy school away from her home so that she would be able to drive her Mom around. After my mom became a nurse, she got married and became a wife and a mother. Since then, she has continued to work 2 jobs. She has 6 children total and 4 of them were adopted from foster care. She was a foster mother for 23 yrs. My mother always has volunteered in the community, and at church and loved taking care of kids. She also told me how she loved being a mother and grandmother. In her eyes, they are the most important things she has ever become.
Next, I talked to my sister. She told me that when she was in school there were friend groups. It seems like in elementary school it was solely dependent on your class since you were with that group most of the day. Middle school began to further separate peers but again it was still mostly dependent on who you spent the most time with and what activities you were involved in with those people. Her main group was the girls from the basketball and softball teams since those were the people with who she got to spend the most extracurricular time. High school seemed to allow everyone to branch back out with different groups because we had more independence in what activities we could attend once we were able to drive to our activities. Being active in sports and scholarly activities made her friend groups fairly diversified.
My sister also told me that she would say when she was a kid there were still very specific expectations for gender roles in Alabama, especially in sports. Women played softball and volleyball and men played baseball and football, but she thinks it was more acceptable for girls to play sports. Title IX had been passed before she was born so schools were required to have equal facilities for boys and girls. By the time my sister got to medical school in 2010, she told me there was an equal number of men and women in the class. They're still male-dominated fields like surgery and female-dominated like pediatrics but I think that is becoming more and more diverse. My sister also said that she never really experienced race as a problem, because her high school was majority white, so her exposure was limited. She also told me that she does not remember there being any conflict because of someone being of a different race.
My sister also told me that she would say when she was a kid there were still very specific expectations for gender roles in Alabama, especially in sports. Women played softball and volleyball and men played baseball and football, but she thinks it was more acceptable for girls to play sports. Title IX had been passed before she was born so schools were required to have equal facilities for boys and girls. By the time my sister got to medical school in 2010, she told me there was an equal number of men and women in the class. They're still male-dominated fields like surgery and female-dominated like pediatrics but I think that is becoming more and more diverse. My sister also said that she never really experienced race as a problem, because her high school was majority white, so her exposure was limited. She also told me that she does not remember there being any conflict because of someone being of a different race.
Society
In this section, I am going to be talking about inequality as a female and gender. First, I am going to start with gender. I think people are the gender they were born as. Someone’s Gender Identity can be what they were assigned at birth or how they see themselves, and I identify as what I was assigned at birth. People relate dresses and skirts to females and tend to relate suits and ties to males. I love makeup, pageants, high heels, and dresses, and my favorite color is pink. These are a few things people relate to gender. People always say to me “You’re so girly” just because I do certain things. I always dress up when I go out somewhere, wear makeup, wear heels, I always have to have my nails painted, and have a pink purse. I do not feel like this will change over time.
In the makeup community, I would say it’s about a solid 90% female population. Gender I also feel like is an important aspect of life when it comes to the nursing field. Most people tend to think of a woman when they refer to a nurse. Women are seen as mothers, caregivers, compassionate and nurturing. All of those characteristics are similar to what a nurse is. I asked a few of my friends which gender first came to mind when thinking of a nurse and all seven of them said, female. I feel as though I have a head start on the care-taking experience just because of my gender.
I also feel like gender is an important aspect when it comes to getting a job. Jobs are where I think border work comes into play. Border-work is when gender boundaries are activated between boys and girls. The workforce is an excellent example of this. In some jobs, people think men get paid more, just because they’re male, or that men have a better chance of getting a position, just because they’re male. This is where inequality comes in as well. Examples of inequality are that men could get paid more than females. This could be a big deal for some, and people want equal pay. I do not agree with men getting paid more than females. I believe it should be a more qualified employee no matter the gender or race. I also feel like gender could be helpful to me in the medical field. I feel like gender matters to some people in certain jobs. For example, when you think of a construction worker, you are likely to think of a male. I feel like for this type of job, they would be biased to hire males versus females.
Gender can influence my role identities in many ways. Being a student, I feel as if most of the time you think of girls that always study more and put more effort into the class. Boys, on the other hand, tend to “slack off” or assume they do not have to try and put forth the effort to pass a class. As a female student, I feel as though my grades and academic performance in class do not seem abnormal since I am a female. Gender could influence my role identity of being an employee. Being a female and an employee, I could potentially get paid less than men, or not be given as many opportunities to have a promotion or the chance of even getting hired for a job.
Summary
In this paper, I gave a summary of my life. In the biography section, I talked about how I was born in Nashville, Tennessee in June 2001. I was taken away from my birth parents when I was just 8 months old. I also mentioned how being taken away from my parents and my aunt’s divorce both had an impact on my socialization. Another thing I talked about was how I started to encounter age-related transition points that require socialization into a new role, such as starting kindergarten. I also mentioned how social groups gave me a sense of belonging and identity. My identity was not an orphan but rather an athlete and a member of several other clubs. I have also seen a lot of inequality once I started attending Wallace State Community College.
In the history section, I talked about how I interviewed my sister and my mother. One thing my mom discussed with me was that gender equality had gotten better as she grew older. Next, my mom talked about social class. My mother also told me school was not like how it is now. Another thing she mentioned was that when she was in high school, there was not a lot of bullying and hardly any cliques. Then I talked to my sister. Being active in sports during her high school years and scholarly activities made her friend groups fairly diversified. She also said when she was a kid there were still very specific expectations for gender roles in Alabama, especially in sports. By the time my sister got to medical school in 2010, she told me there was an equal number of men and women. They're still male-dominated fields like surgery and female-dominated like pediatrics but I think that is becoming more and more diverse.
In the society section, I talked about inequality as a female and gender. I think people are the gender they were born as. I do not feel like this will change over time. Women are seen as mothers, caregivers, compassionate and nurturing. All of those characteristics are similar to what a nurse is. In some jobs, people think men get paid more, just because they’re male, or that men have a better chance of getting a position, just because they’re male. This is where inequality comes in.
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