Gender Inequality and the Family

While perusing a site I recently found, I discovered this little tidbit.

During one cold November week in 1795, Martha Bullard of Hallowell, Maine, listed among her household chores: brewing beer, nursing a sick cow and scouring 35 skeins of wool in preparation for weaving. “A woman’s work is never done, as the song says,” she wrote in her diary that week. “And happy she whose strength holds out to the end of the days.”

In addition to age-stratification, the only other cultural universal by which social roles are allocated is on the basis of gender. Numerous are the temporal strategies for keeping women in their place. The female role has, across cultures and history, been generally characterized by its greater temporal demands, greater age discriminations, and by having to perform a greater number of rituals of temporal deference (e.g., being typically being younger than one’s spouse).

Which brings me to a thought… how can we ever find true equality if our culture believes this to be true? Furthermore, how does this relate in marriages and family situations that aren’t traditionally standard such as the ones this blog seeks to embrace?

THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF AGING
In the Fall of 1996, “The First Wives Club” was packing women into theaters across the country. The movie pushed a common button: aging males trading in their first wives for younger trophy brides.

Why are men allowed to age without penalty while women must look young and lie about their age or risk disqualification from the sexual and marriage markets? Throughout the animal kingdom, the female is the longer-lived sex and yet for years the U.S. Department of Labor labeled women as “old” at age 35 and males “old” at 45?

OK. In American society, strike one against you if you’re old. Strike two if you are female. And what if you a a minority member as well? Enter the so-called “triple- jeopardy” model.

Tags: debate, discussion