Friday, September 21, 2012


Gender inequality at Surrey Center resides in the shops that are there.  It seems that while there are shops that are there for professional men’s dress, there is a great deal of leisure or recreation type stores for men.  The stores that directed towards women include stereotypical things like shoes, wedding dresses, tanning, a specialized fitness studio, antiques, and jewelry.  This means that inequality is taking place in the items and services that are directed and made available to people.  If the items that are available and directed at men are work or leisure oriented and those for women are personal work (fitness and tanning), antiques, jewelry, and shoes there is a difference in the message being sent to these two types of gender.  There are things that are appropriate for men to be involved or interested in and there are activities that are appropriate for women to be interested in.  Men’s activities are professional work and leisure when they are not making money.  Women are to be aesthetically pleasing, work on their body, be interested in jewelry, and focus on the home.  At Surrey Center there does not appear to be much in the way of people not taking the paths of least resistance.  It does seem to be a destination for shopping and dining that reinforces and rewards those that do take the path of least resistance.  I am not able to speak of all the people that spend their money there, but the majority of people appear to be established, well off, or wealthy and interested in things that those classes of people are interested in.  The employees of those businesses may be different though.  The people that I have know that do or have worked there do tend to have different ideas of how society should be structured and do not take the path of least resistance in many aspects of their lives, but they do choose to do so when they are at work due to the requirement that they earn a living and their choices have been limited in some ways and sometimes because they do not choose to take the path of least resistance.  I am at a loss as to how to fight gender inequality at Surrey Center.  This is mainly because it is in some ways a landmark and a destination in Augusta.  It caters to people that are for  the most part not interested in changing the way race, class, and gender are influential in our lives.

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