Perception and Gender Roles

Gender roles are often as much about perception as about division of labor, and currently there is a perception that the structure of the family is under assault by the growth of dual-career marriages, with both parents working, and with a consequent strain on the traditional gender roles within the family. How the participants themselves view the subject is important for how they behave, how they relate to one another and to the rest of the family, and how they solve issues that arise in such a family structure. Whether the participants fully live by traditional gender roles or not, they often invoke those roles either as if they did live by them or as if those roles were somehow constricting to them, and they do this as they negotiate between conflicting goals and expectations within the family.

Hertz describes the new "modern couple" with reference to the supposed gender ideal being held out to so many young women, the idea that she can be the perfect corporate executive and also the perfect wife and mother. The vision for both male and female is of shared careers and responsibilities, in which participants are told they can have it all (Hertz 1-3).

Studies find, however, that traditional gender roles and expectations have not changed greatly in reality. The ideal would have men and women sharing home responsibilities, but studies find that the women themselves did not want to change the traditional aspects of their lives even as they perceived themselves and the

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at the same time: They enter the public domain through paid employment while they reify their roles as mothers, wives, nurturers, and homemakers in order not to threaten either their own or their family's self-definition (Ragon� 52). What these analyses show is that the underlying gender expectations and roles remain powerful in the marketplace today and that they operate on men and women who appear to be living counter to them and who may even express their opposition to them. These men and women cite gender roles at times as they negotiate within the family for power, position, and space. Works Cited Herz, Rosanna. More Equal Than Others. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Hochschild, Arlie. The Second Shift. New York: Viking, 1989. Ragon�, Helena. Surrogate Motherhood. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. The developing legal case regarding the misuse of stored eggs at the University of California at Irvine raises a number of important medical and ethical issues which society will have to face. For most of human history, reproduction followed a set pattern, and the primary concern might come in cases of disputed fatherhood where it was necessary to determine paternity. More recently, thou

Category: Psychology - P