Observations from Roman Holiday

By Yiler Huang

In an attempt to learn about the relationship between male and female in the past, we watched clips from the movie Roman Holiday to observe how men and women interacted with each other from mid 1900s. We compared our observation with the modern society, and discussed about the differences in how men and women interact in different times.

The role of men and women had changed quite a lot from the past. These are my observations of what men or women do differently from now in the movie Roman Holidays. Firstly, men used to be more polite and less casual when talking to women. Men nowadays are more casual. There are also differences in how women express their feelings. Young women acted like teenagers. Young women (over 20) are expected to act maturely nowadays. Daily actions in the past are also very different compared to today's word. Young women had cookie and milk before sleeping, women would hold men’s arms while walking, and women also moved more gently compared to today. In fashion, men wore suits most of the time and they often had hat or ties indoors. Women used to wear gloves as their casual outfit, and they wore one piece pajamas when they slept. Women were also expected to not have high education level in the past, and expected to be protected. Finally, we could also see some differences in how men and women interact with each other. Such as: men would invite women to dance with them politely, men would wake up women sleeping on the street, men touched women more, and men would hold women’s hand despite not knowing them.

I think this happened in the past because man were taught to be “gentlemen” and need to treat women politely, but nowadays people focus more on the equality between two genders.

I think this could also be related to the gentlemen behavior men were expected to have in the past. It might be considered rude if you are not wearing classy clothes in some situations. Nowadays people have more freedom in their choice of fashion, so there is less restriction on what people should wear.

This might be because the topic of sexual harassment was not given much attention, so it didn't feel that weird for a man to touch a woman if they don't have bad intentions. Nowadays, touching people of opposite gender became a taboo in the society due to the awareness for the sexual harassment instances happened recently.

This might be because it was common for women to stay home and do chores in the past, and people would relate the idea of “staying home” with “needs to be protected”. Today, people focuses more on equality so it is gradually happening less.

I think the reason why this happened in the past might be that people see dancing with other people as a classy and high-class entertainment. I think the reason why people don't do this anymore is that there are much more different kind of entertainment to choose. People nowadays would prefer watching Netflix with their friend or partner instead of dancing with them the whole night.

In conclusion, we could see that it seems like interaction between men and women were more open and free back then physically, but there are more norms back then that made people treated each other more politely. On the other hand, people in modern society are more carefully about physical interactions, but are more casual in day to day conversations. If I were to choose which one I like better, I would still choose the modern society because I am already used to it. However, I think it would also be an interesting to live in the past and experience how the difference in interaction between men and women.