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Women & Family & Work

Anita Ilta Garey, in Wharton, writes of the economic, physical, psychological, social and familial struggles of women who work at night and raise families in the daytime. These women work because their families need the money, and they work at night because it allows them to fulfill the responsibilities of being mothers and wives during the day. The most interesting parts of Garey's essay to me have to do with the ideals which women are pursuing as they work at night and raise a family by day, and the role that the 2000 census, as a current event still playing a role in defining America, plays in this set of circumstances. Basically, Garey says that the women are pursuing the ideal of the traditional nuclear family, which portrays the woman/mother/wife as a stay-at-home stabilizer on the domestic front while the husband/father goes to work in the daytime. The census reveals this ideal as a myth.

This situation leaves the woman "free" at night to work, but it is as if such a work-at-night mother simply disappears rather than actually going to work at night. There is a large element of pretense on the part of all the family members. The children claim to not have known that their mothers worked at night. The husbands, clinging to the same myth of the ideal nuclear family, pretend that their wives are not really working because they work at night, or are only part-time or seasonal workers, or because they do not make as much money as the husbands.

It is ironic that the census which fails to take account of the work that these women do at night (as reported by Garey) is the same census which puts the lie to the myth of the traditional nuclear family (as reported by Benfer). Such a nuclear family was dominant in the nation for only a short time, and is today itself dominated by alternative family arrangements which essentially make that nuclear family obsolete as either a reality or an ideal. Such a nuclear family was not dominant ...

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Women & Family & Work. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:23, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701795.html