Parsons said that these roles made things ‘nice and functional’. He also said that men and women were biologically suited to these roles so it was only natural for men to be the breadwinners and women are the stay at home wives. This is a very traditional view. There are many factors affecting power relationships and the division of labour between couples. Firstly, whether a family live in a symmetrical family or not will have an effect on the divisions of labour.
Women carry out the triple burden in the household; the domestic labour, emotional labour, and paid labour. As shown in the item most of this work is ‘unpaid and hardly recognised work at all’. Oakley argues the only way women will gain independence and freedom in society is for the role of the housewife to be removed aswell as the present structure of the family. Wilmott and Young believed the family is symmetrical and that both husband and wife have joint conjugal roles making the family a functional institution and their research showed that men do help women with housework. Radical feminists such as Dobash and Dobash also disagree with Willmott and Young’s theory that the family is symmetrical.
The common perception of marriage is that it was originally weighted heavily in favour of the male member of the couple, and that this has shifted slowly to a more even-handed arrangement in recent years. This essay will examine the question of how accurate this belief really is. Historically, marriage was highly unequal. While the husband took the role of breadwinner and went out to earn the necessary money to support the family, his wife was expected to stay at home and look after the more mundane tasks that make up the day-to-day running of a household. As the former role was commonly seen as more valuable than the latter, this often meant that the husband held most of the power, such as deciding where they would live, how resources were distributed, etc.
For example, women now go out to work, just as men now help with housework and childcare. However Feminists reject the ‘March of Progress’ theory, and argue that women remain unequal within the family. Anne Oakley argues that we still live in a patriarchal (male dominated) society, and therefore women occupy a subordinate and dependant role within the family and wider society. In addition in Mary Boulton’s research backed this, she found that fewer than 20% of husbands had a majority role in childcare. Overall it could therefore be argued that rather than partners becoming more equal, women now have to carry a ‘dual burden’, whereby she is responsible for two jobs of unpaid or paid labour.
EXAMINE THE VIEW THAT DIVISION OF LABOUR BETWEEN COUPLES HAVE BEEN MORE OR LESS EQUAL. [24 MARKS] Domestic division of labour means the gender roles of men and women played in relation to housework, childcare and paid work. For example, men are expected to do more DIY work while women are expected to do the housework and take care of the child by providing emotional support to them. Some sociologists believe that families nowadays are moving towards equality and that the families are becoming symmetrical. A symmetrical family is a family where ale the chores are shared equally between couples.
Outline and assess functionalist and new right views on the family This essay aims to explore the views of the functionalist and new rights approach on the family. Functionalists argue that the family is the most important institution in society as it benefits both the individual and society. They have the most positive view on the family, and state that it performs vital functions for the maintenance of society. Their main emphasis is on the nuclear family which is the stereotypical family of married, heterosexual parents with children - they tend to ignore any other family types. The approach presents the family as a family isolated from wider kinships because of the mobility required by labour markets in industrial societies.
Earlier stated americans believe in the United States that the middle class contains the majority of the population, but Zweig states differently. “ The great majority of Americans form the working class” (Zweig 3). The working class are those people with relatively little power are work. Everyday millions of men and women, no matter their race or religion, preform jobs like; driving trucks, designing hair and stocking shelves. These are all working class jobs, but how can one define these jobs as working class?
Males are considered masculine because they are “rough and tough” and females are considered feminine because of history and women having to act like a “proper lady”. Do our concepts of gender and sex contribute to the ways we embrace gender and sex in diversity? Yes I think our concepts of gender and sex contribute very much to the ways we embrace gender and sex in diversity. I think it has a lot to do with why we think some jobs are for women and some jobs are for men. For example the saying “women should be in the kitchen bare foot and pregnant”.
Furthermore, “33,860” of these kids were exposed to hazardous jobs. One of the main reasons for the employment of children is the demand for fast and cheap production. Nicola Phillips, who works in the Department of Politics at The University of Sheffield, argues that abuse of child labor in private sectors happen because the manufacturing can be done by unskilled workers, meaning that by hiring children, they can spend less on labor cost since all they do is futile work (Phillips et al., 2014). Moreover, Phillips argues that another benefit offered by child labor is the improbability of them creating trade unions to demand higher salaries and better conditions. In other words, a benefit some employers see on child labor is that they
Discuss cultural differences of gender roles One feature of gender roles is the division of labour in which men are hunters and woman are home goddesses and bare children. Cross cultural studies have been carried out and have shown that every society has some division of labour and behaviour by gender (Munroe and Munroe). It was found that childcare is sometimes shared but in no society was in a major responsibility of the male. This collectively suggests that gender roles are biological rather than cultural. Differences in aggressiveness are another feature of gender roles, this is sown in meads study, and she observed three countries in Papua New Guniea and found that males were more aggressive than females.