Gender roles are assumed and there is a lack of communication amongst them. My mom has always taught me to help her maintain the household by cleaning and cooking for the rest of my family. I am the only daughter of a family of three children and have always had the responsibility of accommodating the men in my family. This has caused some resentment towards my brothers. Because the men leave family and home economics to the women, they assume the women will take care of it.
Their desire for self-improvement was evident in their quest to be educated. Most were self-educated and they also sought economic autonomy. This was a significant difference between the black and white women of the antebellum era. The white women continued to be taken care of their husbands and family and continued with their comfortable lives; however the black women, survivors of slavery, out of the need for survival, drew strength from the horrific treatment they endured as slaves. The desire to become educated motivated the black women to learn to read, develop an understanding of the white woman’s culture, and work to support themselves as they developed skills that would prove to be invaluable.
Women were supposed to follow the husbands command. We weren’t allowed to vote except in New Jersey. Women’s role was clear that they should focus on marriage and children. When Eliza’s father left her in charge of the plantation her neighbors were shocked (8). They were shocked that she was taking over this role because the women’s job was to simply take care their husbands and children.
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.
Chelsea Lightner Professor Cheryl Cardiff ENG 230 Magic in Realism In the traditional Latin America, especially during the early twentieth century, a woman’s place was in the home. Every woman born into this culture was expected to serve their fathers and brothers, up until they were old enough to be married, and at that time, was expected to serve their husbands and children. These women, who felt as if they were prisoners of the expectations that the patriarchal society put upon them, would find freedom in creativity with cooking, crafts, and used storytelling, gossip, and advice as an outlet of their frustrations. They created their own sub-culture within the oppressive worl in which they lived. That being said, Laura Esquivel’s novel, “Like Water for Chocolate,” can be seen as a protest against the oppression of women in Latin America.
Depending on the lower or upper level of the middle class, women were able to be work as school mistresses, or not work at all and only take care of the house. As upper class and middle class women had little advantages to their life, lower class women often had none. They were married to poor farmers, with no education and often had to work just as hard as their husbands, maybe even harder as they had a responsibility of taking care of the house and children. In some parts of the Western Europe, lower class women had to work in textile mills or various workhouses parted away from their families, working many, many hours. Double burden was also common at the beginning of 1900’s as women worked to earn money but also had the responsibility for unpaid, domestic labor.
“This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt...” (Kincaid 200) is a pa chore that you don’t see many woman nowadays doing (especially for their own father). In earlier times it was very common for the woman in the house to do all of the chores for the men in the family. They would cook and clean simply because they were expected to, whereas now in the 21st century men and woman both take on the responsibility of taking care of the household
128 Bellamy) As he describes how women’s life was dictated in the hands of men. At this time women were able to get an education but not just any woman, a woman of money as for a man also. A woman may work but once she is to be married all ties to work are cut and she is to become his wife. Which leaves her to do housework, bear, and nurse children for the rest of her
Some of the strongest African American women were sold as breeders, valuable because they were able to produce in addition to work in the house or on a farm. When women were being purchased they were look at from their head to their toes. Once the women were purchased they were working from the time the sun had risen to nightfall. They did not have time to spend with their family unless it was a Sunday and even that was not all the time. The Masters would use the children as bartering tools when African American women would refuse to engage in certain things that the master wanted her to do.
They managed the kitchen, garden, the orchard and the dairy through which they kept their families fed. The women would also help on the farm when they were needed. Some women even up kept their own farms adding on to their daily labor. On the frontier rarely was a farm able to function without the women’s participation or a household run without their daily supervision. Aside from historians only depicting their roles as housewives women were also grouped into three certain groups known as the refined lady, the helpmate, and the bad woman.