Crying sexism

Alan Paton establishes that men are ranked higher and more dominant in his novel by treating the two sexes differently.  He treats the women with a lower respect than the others by saying that they are ones who are down in the valley scratching up the earth to grow maize that hardly reaches the height of a man : "Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man"(34).  This tells us that the women are treated as workers or slaves who must work for men, and also that they cannot reach the status that men have.  He also writes : "European garments, some with blankets over their strange assortment, some with blankets over the semi-nudity of their primitive dress, though these were all women.  Men travelled no longer in primitive dress"(43), saying that men have moved from primitive nature onto more modern lives, thus giving men a higher status than those who have not, the women.  Paton also writes : "walking slowly to the door of the church.  Then she sat down at his table, and put her head on it, and was silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute."(40) to show his comparison and connections that he has made between the women, the oxen, and the mute.  His connection is that the women are the workers for society, more specifically men, and that the women are mute and that they have no voice, say or power in the population.  Through this, he has erected this civilization where men are more powerful than women, and by this he shows the reader that the purpose of women is to serve men.