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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 their husbands as equals (Herz 11-12). Herz analyzes specifically dual career couples rather than merely couples who both work, and career couples have less freedom and more responsibility outside the home. Herz finds that most of the women interviewed described their transition from job to career as a breakthrough and couched this in terms of visions of dependency. One husband showed opposition to traditional gender roles by seeing his wife as too dependent, a...

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Perception and Gender Roles. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:38, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682498.html