Family, Home and Gender
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This paper is an examination of the economic and societal changes that are creating the latest changes in the meaning of family, home, and male and female roles within the family in America. These concepts have always been evolving in response to industrialization, technology, and economic forces within the larger society. Definitions and roles that are considered traditional are actually no more permanent than newer responses. The feminist movement and women's liberation efforts are as much an economic response as they are a societal realization that the sexes have an inherent right to equal treatment. Although sociologists disagree about the extent to which gender equality has been established or can be established, male/female relations within marriage have undergone fundamental changes over the last few decades. This evolution is certain to continue, irrevocably altering the nature of the American family, and economic factors are the principal force driving this evolution. In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein describes a modern family that has attempted to invent a nontraditional family model. Originally an example of "the new traditional family" (Orenstein 42), Michael Scully and Doreen Lorenzo had established a two-career marriage with one child and another on the way. Scully's work "paid the mortgage, [and] . . . kept the family afloat," while Lorenzo's income provided the money for extras (Orenstein 42). This has become a co
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ted "a new respect for women's intellectual and moral strength" (Scholten 90-91). This change laid the groundwork for women to become educated in more than social skills and eventually made possible movements for women's suffrage and women's liberation. Hareven writes, "Women responded to the pressures to create and maintain an ideal home in isolation from the rest of the world by taking the ideals of domesticity into the larger society, and by investing their energies in various reform movements and purity crusades" (259). Marriage continued to evolve in response to the changing face of society as a whole.
By the time the two-job family had become the majority model in American society, marriage had evolved into an institution that attempted to accommodate modern pressures and ideals, however unsuccessfully. Hochschild identifies three gender ideologies found in two-job families, traditional, transitional, and egalitarian (15), which represent the range of the evolution which families are currently undergoing. The traditional ideology is based on the perceptions that developed during industrialization, that the husband should be the primary breadwinner and the wife, while working outside the home and supplementing the fami
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Census Bureau, Catherine Scholten, Scully Lorenzo, Doreen Lorenzo, , Arlie Hochschild, Peggy Orenstein, Tamara Hareven, York York, Times Magazine, american family, family life, women's liberation, two-job family, scully lorenzo, york times magazine, american society, industrialization changed, stalled revolution, york york, two-job families,
Approximate Word count = 1563
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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