Gender, Gender And Sexual Norms

After World War II, the nation was blooming. Everything was growing, people were going to college, and wealth grew. The idea of the perfect American life was developed, this included a husband that worked and a wife that stayed home and took care of the house and children. To look at how women are affected by this perfect life I am analyzing “Governor Adlai Stevenson Tells College Women about Their Place in Life, 1955” and “Good Housekeeping: Every Executive Needs a Perfect Wife, 1956”.

    Several changes have occurred since the 1920s in traditional family values and the family life. Research revealed several different findings among family values, the way things were done and are now done, and the different kinds of old and new world struggles.

Over the course of the last sixty years, family values have consistently continued to change. With a heavier influx of women entering the work force and the social emphasis of individualism, the traditional family image has changed, and with

The American family has changed throughout history and has brought along gender and sexual norms. However, some parts of the family and these gender norms have been fairly constant as America has progressed and may even be seen today. These changes and similarities can be seen through the families during the colonial times, the 1800s, and the 1950s.

The treatment of the male gender role is altogether different from that of the female gender role, and this issue has turned out to be important. Gender roles were extraordinarily changed in the 1950s, with the men returning from war and taking their occupations back. Females had, throughout World War II, taken men’s occupations while they had been away at war. After the war, numerous women needed to keep their occupations. Instead, a considerable amount of them got to be spouses and moms as the men returned from the war. For example, the male spouses were away at work for most the day while the wives would need to do a decent measure of the manual work around the house. The type of chores could have been cleaning, cooking, or other tasks the female spouses handled. These adjustments in the home might not have been viewed as positive but rather they were for women. Ladies truly advanced in the fifties with finding new openings for work and discovering their place in the world. Therefore, two articles explain further in detail about the

After all the devastation brought about by the Great Depression and World War II, Americans desired and sought for a return to normalcy during the 1950s. With men away at war and women pursuing jobs, the rate of divorce skyrocketed as families were being split apart. Juvenile delinquency rose in great numbers due to the lack of parental supervision during wartime. This evoked fear in the American people that the survival of the “traditional American family” was in jeopardy. Thousands of women were pushed out of the workforce and back into their homes as returning soldiers resumed their positions on the job. Suburban housing flourished as the notion to conform spread across the country. The 1950s was a period of conventionality, when both men and women practiced strict gender roles and complied with society’s expectations in attempts to recreate the “American Dream”. The concept of the “Ideal Woman” created a well-defined picture to women of what they were supposed to emulate as their proper gender role in society. A woman was told her primary interest was everything but herself. She was expected to cook, clean, take care of the kids, and be a loving wife who waits for her husband to come home in order to adhere to his needs. Taking time to care for herself was never in the picture. The idea of conformity trapped these women in suffocating boxes that allowed no room to breathe. The pressure put on women to be the core of the entire family while keeping her husband happy was

Beginning in the late 1800’s, the daily life of a woman was very crucial and consistent. Starting from early morning until dusk, the women would care for children, clean the house, and provide any other services they could. Throughout the late 1800’s, women were treated unfairly due to the women assisting their families, caring for children, and being an American housewife.

In the reading, “From the Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home”, Hochschild explains her experience conducting a case study with a series of different women to get their perceptions of their lives as mothers, but also working women. Moreover, she provides good information to start her study. She reports that in 1950, 30 percent of American women were in the labor force, 28 percent of married women with children worked out of home. Today, those numbers have dramatically increased. During her findings, she saw that women felt a responsibility to be able to balance work and life at home, focused more on children, and expressing how overworked or tired they felt. Whereas men in this study expressed that women did most of the work around the house and childcare. In addition, what stood out to me in this reading was that some men felt pleased that their wives received more income than them. For instance, in an interview a man expressed, “was more pleased than threatened by her

Foremost, the familial image has undertaken significant changes in regards to the ‘breadwinner’ and ‘homemaker’ roles within the family. In the latter of the 20th century, women’s participation in the labour force had been very little to non-existent, primarily because time allocations had been perceived as gender specific, that is, men were seen as the ‘breadwinner’, while women were viewed as the ‘homemaker’ (Seltzer, Bachrach, Bianchi, Bledsoe, Casper, Chase-Lansdale, Diprete, Hotz, Morgan, Sanders, & Thomas, 2005, pp.20). The ‘breadwinner’ role was to secure financial stability, while the

Andrew J cherlin, in his textbook public and private family lives seventh edition, has compiled a plethora of knowledge concerning the roles weeds taken a family as well as how families have changed in the modern era. As I read through the textbook about his theories and perspectives, I found myself looking back to my own childhood I’ve lived through or seen others live through. In just eight short weeks my perspective on many things this changed on issues such as the feminist perspective, postmodern times and how it’s affected marriage, the role of education in our family lives, and declining parental control. These few among many other things that really change my thinking on marriage and family in today’s society, as well as the role that

Doherty begins his book, The Intentional Family, by telling the reader that this century has witnessed a revolution in the structures and expectations of family life. He states that we have reinvented family life away from the traditional family, or how he terms it, the “Institutional Family,” a family based on kinship, children, community ties, economics and the father’s authority. Children are now growing up in single-parent homes or living with a step-family, and an adult is likely to cohabitate, marry, divorce and remarry. The Institutional Family was suited to a world of family farms, small family businesses and tight communities bound together by a common religion. It began to give way during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, when individual freedom and the pursuit of personal happiness and achievement began to be more important than kinship obligations, and when small farms and villages started to give way to more impersonal cities. A new family began to emerge – the “Psychological Family” – replacing the Institutional Family of the past. This new kind of family was based on personal achievement and happiness more than on family obligations and tight community bonds. Doherty believes that in the early twentieth century, Americans turned a corner in family life, never to go back.

Times have changed; the nuclear family is no longer the American ideal because family needs have changed since the 1950's. This American convention of a mother and father and their two children, were a template of films and early television as a depiction of the American family life. Now seen as archaic and cliché by today’s standards, but the idea is common throughout many of the first world nations in the world. This ideal was a vast departure from the past agrarian and pre industrial families, and was modeled and structured as the ‘American dream’ father working, mother maintaining the household and children molded to be simulacra of the parents. This portrayal was not the standard; many communities throughout America had a different

Women had their own jobs and some of them made equal or even more contributions to the family than men. Men’s and women’s roles were largely decided by their economic status within the family. As women gained economic independence from men, they posed a great challenge to men’s absolute authority within the family. If a woman had work, her husband would be more likely to take her advice and she could have more freedom to express their ideas. Without the war, it would be impossible for women to find new opportunities in the job market and then change their roles within the family. World War II led to a revolution in American families and women’s and men’s roles within the family were rearranged after women also became bread winners.

n the upcoming page’s I will answer the following questions. Why is family the most important agent of socialization? What caused the dramatic changes to the American family? What are the changes? I will discuss the differences in marriage and family, I will discuss how they are linked to class, race, gender, and personal choices. The purpose of this study is to explore the many different family functions and the paths that people are now choosing. I will give my opinion on whether these changes have had a positive or negative affect. I will finally discuss the trend of the modern family, back to pre-World War II family structure, how would that effect the strides that have been made in the progression of women rights.

Families have always played an important part in society, from having a son to carry on the family name, having multiple children to help on the farm, to the parents having someone to take care of them when they are unable to do so in their old age. Majority of families before the 1900’s consisted of the husband working and the wife keeping the house along with raising the children. After the 1900’s though the family dynamic would be changing, the large fluctuation of clerical positions were up for grabs and while it was tradition for women to stay home, they seemed to be made for typing. The single woman were more prominent than ever before taking on what society considered gender specific roles such as, nurses, secretaries, librarians, and teaching. While the majority of society believed as Theodore Roosevelt did “the greatest thing for any woman is to