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Living From Our Past : A Summary of Scott Russell Sanders’s “The Men We Carry in Our
Minds”
In Scott Russell Sanders’s “The Men We Carry In Our Minds”, he discusses his
judgements regarding the conflict of gender equality that developed in his mind after observing
the unpleasant lives of the people he grew up around. He uses contrast, narration, and
personal reflections to show the relationship between gender roles of men and women, and the
social class they belong to. The way Sanders depicts his thoughts through narration allows him
to illustrate his own life experiences to support his perspective. Sanders argues that the
individual experiences of people within our society lead to conflicting viewpoints about the
gender roles for men and women. He traces the problem to his youth by explaining that the
men he observed as a child differed greatly from the men who most women might observe. He
describes the men that he saw throughout his childhood as ones that are “killing themselves or
preparing to kill others”, suggesting that men consistently put strain on their bodies to either
bring money into the family or prepare for war. Growing up, Sanders is exposed to the “toiling”
lives of the male figures that surround him which initially shapes his “early vision of manhood”
and made it possible for him to gain a personal perspective of what role men should play in
society. To him, women live l...
