Blog 7 - Gender and creativity

I wrote a blog on this chapter last week (whoops), but even though it's rather short I got quite a bit out of it. It's interesting to compare gender with creativity. Don't we usually assume that women are more creative than men? Maybe because of specific roles we've been placed in - we're supposed to cook, help kids with homework, art projects, etc. We're always coming up with something to make for dinner, experimenting with new things, helping the kids build their first baking soda volcano. However, when we consider different art forms - for instance, writing - for so long women were stuck in the background, maybe even using pen names just to get their work out there, and being read like "genius" men. When I was re-reading this chapter these are the things I was thinking about - did Frida Kahlo paint mostly about her relationship with her husband because that is what plagued her most, or because she was a woman and a woman wasn't able to do much more than belong to a man? Was it natural gender socialization? As men and women we are trained from birth to do certain things, think certain ways, accept certain ideals. I think this is the beauty of creativity, in a way it's "gender-less", you may never know if a man or woman painted something, wrote something, sculpted something, if no one ever told you. Creativity is just allowed to be, to be beautiful and interesting, and to be whatever the creator makes of it.