Family and Gender Roles

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Jan 9, 2024

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1 Family and Gender Roles Student's Name Institution Affiliation Course Name and Number Instructor Date

2 Family and Gender Roles Prompt I a). Pride and Prejudice by Emily Bronte Family and gender roles are important roles in the literary work above. Bronte's books revolve around love, hate, passion, family, and gender roles. In Pride and Prejudice, most of the story revolves around the Bennet family (Austen, 2001). The family comprises seven people: mother and father and their five daughters. The daughters have come of age, and the parents are pressured by society to marry them off to suitable suitors. At some point in the story, the parents demonstrate their stress and fears regarding the marriage of their daughters. That is worsened when the Bennet daughters are disappointed with the people they thought they had established a connection with and would marry them. The desire for most families in the story to marry their daughters to suitable suitors is an excellent example of family as a theme. Aside from family, gender is also an important theme in the book, which is revealed through the daughters of the Bennet family and others. The central role placed on them by their society is protecting their families from shame by finding suitable suitors. For instance, Mr. Bennet permits his daughters several times to find suitable suitors to protect his family's honor (Austen, 2001). Regardless of their search for better men, the Bennet sisters try to be on their best behavior to protect their family from shame, so they cannot move in with any man unless they are legally married. However, when Lydia elopes to live with Wickham outside wedlock, Elizabeth is devastated about the shame that would befall her family (Austen, 2001). Her reaction to how society would view their family is an excellent example of the standards set on the female gender by their society not to have sexual relations or live with someone without the proper formalities. That also means that the female gender was entrusted with the role of

3 protecting their families from shame and dishonor by marrying into the right families and remaining modest while at it. b). The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin The Story of an Hour is another excellent example of a literary work that demonstrates the themes of family and gender roles. Her work is about a young woman, Louise, who marries Mr. Ballard but is unhappy and desires freedom from the restraints and constraints placed on her as a woman living in a patriarchal society (Chopin, 1981). The family theme is important to the story as Louise's society appreciates women who can be good wives and nature families. The union between man and woman creates a family in the story, and Chopin also mentions other women living in similar conditions as Louise. In that regard, marriages with then create family act as a prison that prevents women from being free and chasing their dreams because if they do so, they become unfit for what it means to be a good woman. Gender roles are also an important theme in the book, which Louise depicts through her thoughts and imagination through her bedroom window, which is the only place she can see outside, according to the story's context. According to society, a woman's place is by her husband, and if anything wrong happens to the husband, the woman ought to be distraught. That is why when Josephine, Louise's sister, delivers the message of Mr. Ballard's death to Louise, the latter acts as if she is devastated and needs alone time in her room. However, when she retreats to her room, she is overwhelmed with happiness that eventually gives her a heart attack. She could only demonstrate the happiness of her husband's death in secret as it would be wrong in the eyes of society for her to do it in front of her sister and the other guests (Chopin, 1981). Therefore, the role of gender and family in Chopin's story is ensuring everything women do is for their families husbands, but themselves.

4 Prompt II According to the article The Role of Fathers in Child and Family Health. Engaged Fatherhood for Men, Families and Gender Equality: Healthcare, Social Policy, and Work Perspectives , the roles and dynamics of families and genders are changing. According to the article, in recent years, it is no longer mandatory for families to comprise a father, mother, and children. As times change, many children are under the primary care of single parents, either by the choice of the single parent or by law (Yogman & Eppel, 2022). This article shows that unlike before, when families would be made of fathers taking care of the family's financial needs and mothers attending to the domestic needs, the roles can change, and both genders can do the duties and roles performed by the other, either as a family or not. For instance, this article focuses on men as single parents and primary caretakers of their children without the mother or co-parents (Yogman & Eppel, 2022). As mentioned above, women were the primary caretakers of children in the past decades and centuries. That was because fathers were in charge of taking care of the family's financial needs and protecting them, which ceases to be the case in modern society. Currently, men and women have equal rights and opportunities to participate in the professional field, care for their families and children, and still attend to their professional obligations. Basically, the article demonstrates the transforming family and gender dynamics regarding their roles and what they represent. It shows this by giving statistics on the increasing number of single parents who no longer rely on the standards of the historical family unit to form a family. Additionally, the primary caregiver can be a man who can raise the children just as the mothers would have. Prompt III a). Historical Contexts

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