Well done on the first week's post! I enjoyed reading your comments. I loved the effort and thoughtfulness of your comments. Remember, this week you have to place your post on your own blog. You have to leave two comments on two other blogs. You can respond to my blog as one your two comments after you post or you can comment on two other students blogs. Go to your class section on our class blog and you will find the links to the other students in your section. I want you to copy the comments that you leave on others blogs and paste a copy to your own blog under your post for the week. Just go back to your original post and hit comment and copy the comment. I have to grade a lot of blogs between two sections so this will help me find all your work each week. Remember, you have to fully participate for credit each week. It must be one good post and two good comments, no partial credit for partial participation.
So, this week, let's examine our gender roles? How come so many of us adhere to gender roles in this day and age? IF men and women are moving towards equality in relationships, workplace, etc. how come we still adhere to masculine and feminine roles? My husband and I both are college professors, yet, the distribution of work around the house is still not evenly divided. I am still taking on the role of cleaning, childcare, organizing the home, shopping. My husband does his "manly" duties but, does significantly less around the home...yet, we both teach/work full time? How is it that as a gender communication instructor that I am caught up in these roles? Do you find yourself stuck in old fashion gender roles? Or, perpetuate their existence in your life, family, work, school? Do these roles help us understand ourselves better, and promote our personal goals or inhibit our growth? Are they barriers to our society or merely means to civility? How are you playing out gender roles in your life?
Well, let see, my husband and I are married over 20 years and we are both at or near 50 years old. While you would think that we would have many traditional gender roles in our marriage, we actually don't. Early in our marriage when our kids were little I had the primary caregiver role, especially early when I was a stay at home mom. We both made that decision, I had a great job in HR with a very large consumer product company that was located in Princeton at the time. I gave up my job to stay home until our daughter was ready for kindergarten (in our township that's 4 years old). It was the logical choice - he earned more money than I did, had the healthcare benefits too, and had the ability to work overtime which I didn't. Besides that, I always loved being a mom (still do) and completely enjoyed my time with my kids. He worked overtime to support the family and I took care of everything else. I went back to work in our local school district as a secretary and was able to enjoy being a working mom that was fortunate to be able to be there for school plays and Mothers Day tea's and room parent and field trips. Neither of us wanted our kids to have to do without having parents around to enjoy things with just so they could have things. Now both our kids are grown - our son (my son from a previous marriage) is 26 and in the Air Force and our daughter 20 is a Junior majoring in Biology at a University in Lancaster, PA. As our kids grew up, so did we... My husband loves to cook and he's much better at it than I am. He gets home from work before I do and usually has dinner going when I get home. After dinner, I clean up - its only fair that way. We both keep the laundry going and feed or clean up after the dog. I was raised to do my part inside or outside the house and he was raised in a very large family where everyone had to pitch in, so it works. After a while we transcended 90% of the gender roles, now we just take care of business. I say 90% because I still have the tendency to clean up faster than he does...he would do it eventually but not fast enough for me. :-) Maybe my generation was fortunate to be raised and appreciate having traditionally gender roled parents but also the benefit of both working. We learned to appreciate both and try to balance it in our lives. I hope we raised our kids to balance the roles (family/work) without too much of the gender role game playing involved. Only time and fingers crossed will tell...but I think we were successful!
ReplyDeleteI find myself adhering to a traditional gender role as a female. It may be because of the way I was raised. Now my parents are divorced, however growing up my mother cooked, cleaned and took care of the kids while my father basically worked and came home. He expected to be catered to even though he never publicly stated this. Being a police officer, I knew he had a stressful job but I always found it odd that he would come home from work and expect dinner on the table. I wonder what it would have been like if my mother forgot or decided to wait until later to provide this.
ReplyDeleteAnother observation, was that my traditional parents followed roles that of their own parents. Both sets of my parents acted the same way. The female took care of the home and kids and the male worked.
Being in my mid 20's and unmarried, I still think this would work for me. If in a relationship, I notice that I enjoy these roles a lot. I work full-time and am an excellent business person but yet I often find myself in the traditional woman's role at home.
Like Michelle I grew up with parents acting within their traditional gender roles. I think this has a great effect on children who observe and essentially absorb their parents’ behavior as role models. I too was confused by my father’s expectations of my mother. Why was my mother who worked just as long hours, expected to have a healthy home made meal on the table every night? My father also never cleaned off the kitchen table, did the laundry, cared for or walked the family dog, or bothered to help us with homework. To a child one could confuse his “masculine” role of bread winner as pretty uncaring. I’m not saying this is true of all those who adhere to this gender role, but it was how I saw him as a child. I thought the dynamic was unfair and I felt badly for my mother who always put the family first, while my father seemed to put himself first. My mother kept an immaculately clean house and raised two very strong, loving, and intelligent daughters with great integrity. I would not applaud my father in the same way as my memories of him are predominantly as disciplinarian, a lay about in front of the television or as an absentee since he spent much of his time in the “man cave” of our basement. I found I looked for opposing qualities in a relationship to prevent carrying on this structure in my future family. My boyfriend cleans and cooks better than I do! He takes care of pets as though they are children. Furthermore, he is sensitive and nurturing without this having any threat to his masculinity. Sometimes I notice friends whose fathers were “tough guys” marrying a very similar type of man. I feel I’m more aware of this due to my upbringing and the gender roles played out in my family. I’m keenly aware of gender roles and am grateful for this awareness.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the 60’s in a traditional Irish Catholic family with eight children, a stay at home mother, and working father. Remembering back…my mother did it all except work outside of the home. My father on the other hand was the only breadwinner. I recall him basically going to and coming from work. I still have the vivid picture of him walking in the front door after an hour commute from Philly, kissing my mother on the cheek, changing out of his suit, pouring my mother a glass of wine and a mixed drink for him and watching the news until dinner was on the table. When someone asks me how my relationship was with my father when I was a child I would have to say ‘What relationship?’ I should add a disclaimer though….as an adult I see things a little differently and understand the gender roles that were traditional for my parents’ generation. As a child, we don’t always see things clearly and from my prospective, my mother did it all. Move ahead twenty years and initially in my marriage I fell into the same pattern as my parents. I left college because I wanted to raise my children myself. I used to joke with my friends saying that if my kids were screwed up I wanted it to be my fault. I didn’t want the ‘out’ of blaming someone else. Since I wasn’t working, I felt that everything else was my responsibility but I do remember many moments when I was resentful of my husband’s assumption that his workload had to be heavier than mine. How draining could childcare be compared to dealing with a stressful commute into the city, eight stressful hours of work, only to have to turn around for a stressful return trip back home?
ReplyDeleteLife sometimes forces change though. As my children moved on to college and beyond, I had a career opportunity that would involve me traveling. It was amazing how our gender roles changed (sort of) at that point. I was on the road a few days each week and my husband managed to survive. Hummm. Imagine that. He has become quite self-sufficient to the point where I don’t even think about what to cook for dinner because he has it planned out and he will due laundry if the hamper is full. Don’t let me paint the picture too rosy though…he doesn’t clean the house. I refuse to come home on a Friday to a dirty house so we do have a woman come clean every other week. Thanks to a promotion, my travel schedule has decreased measurably and this caused a new adjustment for both of us. At times, I see my husband slipping back into the traditional masculine gender role but I pull him back. I tease him that there is no going back.
Life sometimes helps to break the traditional gender roles but the parties involved need to see that there is not a sign of weakness but instead a sign of growth.