Rough Draft For Better Or For Worse

People believe that marriage is easy and is the key to love and happiness, but in reality marriage is harder than it looks. Everyone marries for different reasons, for good or for bad. People today don’t understand the meaning of marriage; it is more than just money and appearance. Seeing today’s world of marriage is being influenced by media shows like Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, and Murray makes you realize how society today identifies marriage different. Couples who live unmarried will be happier and have more choices than those that are married in agreement with Catherine Newman’s essay called I Do. Not.: Why I Won’t Marry in the book “Acting Out Culture: Reading and Writing “, by: James S. Miller. Catherine Newman is a writer and an author

In society in the 1950’s the average woman played an inferior role to men. Men considered themselves superior to women and often expected women to cater to their wishes. Females were expected to adjust their feelings , thoughts and actions to accommodate men's beliefs. The “do not speak unless spoken to” rule was common for women. They were expected to obey their husbands and fathers without hesitation. In order to be judged as respectable, they would have to remain sexually pure until marriage. After a minimum amount of schooling, women had to find a suitable young man to marry. In some instances a woman’s parents would orchestrate an arranged marriage to benefit their social status or income. Being put in such a position deteriorated a woman’s power. Today, women have fewer guidelines to abide by. First, women

In Andrew J. Cherlin’s essay “American Marriage In Transition”, he discusses how marriage in America is evolving from the universal marriage. Cherlin’s definition of the universal marriage in his essay is the man is the breadwinner of the household and the woman is the homemaker. In the 20th century according to Cherlin, the meaning of marriage has been altered such as the changing division of labor, childbearing outside of marriage, cohabitation, gay marriage and the result of long- term cultural and material trends (1154). During the first transition of marriage, Cherlin discusses how in America, Europe, and Canada the only socially accepted way to have sexual relations with a person and to have children is to be married (1154). The second change in marriage occurred in 2000, where the median age of marriage in the United States for men is 27 and women is 25 (1155). Many young adults stayed single during this time and focused on their education and starting their careers. During the second change, the role of law increasingly changed, especially in the role of law in divorce (1155). It is proven in today’s research marriage has a different definition than what it did back in the 1950’s. Today marriage can be defined as getting married to the same gender or getting remarried to someone who already has kids. The roles in a marriage are evolving to be a little more flexible and negotiable. However, women still do a lot of the basic household chores and taking care of the

On the social aspect, women returned to the weak and demure image of helpless women. ?Momism? became the term to describe the ideal household women in the 1950s. As always, men dominated the suburban household. People once again became religious in fear of being accused otherwise. Female sexuality became a shocking issue of the 50s. With the moral of Christian culture, premarital sex and other lewd acts were shunned from society.

Beginning in the early 1960’s the average age of men and women rose back to an all-time high, with men around 27 and women around 25. This is where we start seeing more individualized marriages. Most of them wanted to stay single until they finished their education and found some sort of stable job to support the family. So that’s when it came a lot more acceptable to have kids outside the marriage and have a family without being married. The divorce rate increased substantially and so did the number of same sex marriages, which was looked upon differently for the first time. For the household chores the men in the relationship started to become a lot more understanding and more helpful in the house. This is when we also see both the men and women working outside the home. Around the end of the 60’s and into the 70’s is where we saw articles talking about how to sustain a working family and society started to establish a happy functional family. There were three levels which was

According to the textbook, Cherlin refers to the 1950s as the “breadwinner-homemaker family” (Cherlin, 76) time period. Marriage occurred at younger ages and the birthrate increased. During the 1950s, men could support their families on a single wage referred to as the “family wage” (Cherlin, 67). With the family wage women and kids did not have to enter the labor force. It also created a separation of spheres between men and women. Women stayed at home to raise their children and had limited domestic roles, while men were out in the world working. Today, people are marrying at later ages and the birthrate is not as high as it used to be in the 1950s. The idea of the family wage faded away during the time of the post-nuclear family. Today it is more acceptable for women to have jobs as well as their partner to help support their family. Today many families have variations of how they support their family and who the caretaker is. Women are no longer designated to the domestic sphere nor are men the only ones in the labor force.

Woman in the 1950s were simply seen as housewives. Their place was regarded at home where they nurtured the husband and cared for their dependent children. The average marriage age at that time was 21 and the mean total of children per family was regarded as 2.4. Divorce in the fifties was extremely rare as marriage was viewed as everlasting. Women had diminutive rights during this era, where they were only seen to be helpful with domestic jobs and childcare.

Life in the 1950s was a time where when a women was married and has kids she would stay home taking care of the meals, and children. Men would be the ones to go out and find a good job that helps with money problems. Also sometimes married women would hire a nanny to also help around the house. In the 1950s men respected women more than they do today because women were supposed to be beautiful and elegant. Also men were able to be a gentleman around women.

While the 1950’s had been very conservative, the stay-at-home housewives, the perfect families and home lives, children of the baby boom soon alternated this into a very different kind of

An average, women during the 1960’s were held accountable for many responsibilities. Women led very different lives during this time period. Punctual, responsible, and reliable were just some of the many standards that were expected from society. At the age of twenty women were expected to be married; soon after they would become pregnant. Raising a family and devoting their lives to be the best housewives possible. Legally women made no earnings or any income for that matter. Child care and in vigorous chores were a part of their daily routine. Women had no say financially. Women had one duty, and that was to be a housewife. Men had all the control in marriages; after all they were the bread winners. Women were stuck in a vicious cycle of controlling and power hungry men. Comparing women from the 10960’s to the women in today’s generation is quite astonishing. The women’s rights movement fought for women to be free. Women no longer need to be chained to such degrading and depressing circumstances. Raising a family and having a husband is a beautiful goal most women dream of. However, we should also have the right to decide when we want to marry and to whom we believe is the right candidate. “Why I Want a Wife” written by Judy Brady raises a powerful message on women in the 1960’s. Judy touches upon the idea that women had constantly been expected to be in confined and submissive relationships. Brady perfectly depicts the

The treatment of the male gender role is altogether different from that of the female gender role, and this issue has turned out to be important. Gender roles were extraordinarily changed in the 1950s, with the men returning from war and taking their occupations back. Females had, throughout World War II, taken men’s occupations while they had been away at war. After the war, numerous women needed to keep their occupations. Instead, a considerable amount of them got to be spouses and moms as the men returned from the war. For example, the male spouses were away at work for most the day while the wives would need to do a decent measure of the manual work around the house. The type of chores could have been cleaning, cooking, or other tasks the female spouses handled. These adjustments in the home might not have been viewed as positive but rather they were for women. Ladies truly advanced in the fifties with finding new openings for work and discovering their place in the world. Therefore, two articles explain further in detail about the

Also, these women had a different point of view in regards to the sexual life. They learn to love and be passionate about their husbands. Passion is important to them since they don’t spend much time with their husbands otherwise. That was probably not the case with most American women in the 1950’s when husbands and wives didn’t even share a bed.

In over half a century, marriage has transformed from being a social requirement to simply being an option in today’s society. What has caused this change? Many institutions in our society have changed drastically along with marriage. Although these institutions have not caused marriage to be optional, they do strongly correlate with the decreased value. The economy, education, religion, and government have all altered since the 1950s. When any institution encounters a change, all other institutions are affected. Family is a major institution in society, and I believe that marriage is an important aspect of this institution. Cohabitation, religion, women in the work world and divorce have all effected the way marriage is viewed today.

Gender roles, the public image of being a particular gender that a person presents to others (gender roles, n.d.), have seen many changes through the years, especially in families. The changes can be seen in many aspects, including television shows, from the traditional family in the I Love Lucy sitcom of the 1950s to the plethora of shows about women and men who balance working and family life of the 2000s. A traditional family can be defined as “… the ‘natural reproductive unit’ of mom, pop, and the children all living under one roof… (Ball, 2002).” The 1940s, a period dominated by this type of family, were primarily a time of single-income families where the father was the ‘breadwinner’ and the mother the ‘homemaker (Hayghe, H.V., 1990).’

In 1950s, there were rules to be followed. Men should make living and carry the family, and women should take care of children, stay in the house and be obedient. Unlike people with “unbroken free” will now, each one was expect to do what they supposed to do instead of what they simply want to do. As result, people suffered from standards. “When Judith Wallerstein recently interviewed 100 spouses in ‘happy’ marriages, she found that only five ‘wanted a marriage like their parents’.’ The husbands ‘consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers. The women said they could never be happy living as their mother did.” (Coontz 33) Apparently, the cage is gone, and people enjoy living in the way they like rather than the fixed way. However, as the result, freedom didn’t