The Lady And The Tramp By Gwendolyn Mink Analysis

The article “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective” by Angela Davis addresses on the liberation of women from their socially regarded functions in society. She explores the idea of capitalist critique and feminism, and she argues that housework is annoying as much as it is disempowering women in the society and women need to be released and discharged from these duties (Angela, 2011). Angela's unique perspective on women's roles as housewives and history of house works gives us a clear perspective on the plight of women in society. The article shares a different perspective to the traditional view of women as housewives in the community. Instead of judging women on their femininity and history of their work

“The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.” This quote from Margaret Sanger highlights many first wave feminists views about the restrictions of motherhood, marriage, and household responsibilities. Many women saw being a mother as a chore or as something out of their control. Sanger fought these restrictions through bringing birth control to the general public who suffered from poverty due to large families. Others, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, wrote social critiques in her texts “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland to bring attention to how society treats women and ideally how motherhood should be. Both of these women believed motherhood was a responsibility of women and they should take it more seriously to create better future generations. This goes beyond the suffrage and equality movement because it dictated that women’s sexual emancipation was equally important as women’s legal emancipation. Being a mother was considered a woman’s most crucial task at this time, therefore the power behind female sexual education and birth control challenged society to feminist.

Dating back throughout history woman were often considered to be too soft or docile to work. In the early 1800’s, as well as the 1950’s, it was thought that woman should not only be pure in heart, mind and body, but that they should be submissive to their husbands and not work outside the home, this was known as the Cult of Domesticity (Keister & Southgate, Inequality: a contemporary approach to race, class and gender, 2012, p. 228).

In the next chapters, the struggles of women and children are outlined. The jobs for women of the early 1800’s consisted of sewing, washing, cleaning, cooking, and reproducing the next generation of laborers. In , a rise in domestic service also ensued within black or white, free and enslaved women. These women were hired as servants, nannies, and maids. Children also began working as well. Orphans were often used as domestic servants and teen apprentices. The Female Association Charity School taught destitute girls who were raised on streets to read, write, cipher, sew. They were also trained to be domestic servants and then hired in the future. Women were paid much less than men, because it was thought that they were dependent of their husbands; it was unheard of to have “female breadwinners”. Factory accidents, crime, abandonment, and abuse from husbands left women desperate to support children. The wages that seamstresses had in early 17th century Baltimore was not a living wage. It was not substantial enough to support themselves or their children. So in 1833, women held strike and refused to work only worked if employers paid them wages equal that of to men. The results of the protest was not what was hoped. Women were actually paid less after the strike, but the

Domestic work and other types of work that is typically associated with women has always been undervalued and overlooked. Many types of work fall under the umbrella of domestic labor, such as: cooking, cleaning, mending, child care, running errands, managing the household, and much more. This type of work is highly undervalued and often ignored. Many of the works that we have looked at in this section highlight how many women felt about the domestic sphere that they were placed in. In this essay I will discuss this point using points from "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Professions For Women". Both women commented on the domestic sphere for women and what that meant for them.

is routine work, little glory, and low pay, men prove willing to admit women to equal share in the spoils office ”. Once they gained more political influence, women were eager “to continue the reforms of the Progressive era” . Called by the scholars as “maternalistic” approach, women sought to improve the conditions of poor women and children. They lobbied with a success for “education and industrial reform, wage and hour laws for working women, a wide range of child health problems on the state level, as well as a broad extension of women’s legal rights” .

“Branded with Infamy” draws one into the challenges that poor women and children face every day (Adair). Stricken with poverty leaves women and children that are already suffering, forced to suffer more, which Adair brings up in this article when she’s talking about her mother having to work twice as hard to be discipline for her husband walking out on her (Adair, 236). The article “Enforcing the Work Ethic” has more of a focus on the welfare system for poor women and children (Hays). This article addresses the issues of how mothers are forced to find a job right away and when they are unable to meet all the requirements the welfare system is requesting then they end up losing their welfare forcing them and their children to live without

As part of the larger movement for equal rights, this feminist mobilization focused on a broad spectrum of economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the distribution of power that entailed the discrimination of women. Political struggles targeted the stigmatization of women as caregivers and the devalorization of this role in relation to that of the male breadwinner, a mainstream culture of sexism permeating all spheres of life and cutting across income and educational levels, as well as women’s unequal access to and unequal positioning within the labor market. (Azmanova 751)

Women even before the formation of the welfare state were given only the role as family caretaker in order to allow for the man to work and create economic stability for the country. Even as the roles of women changed slightly into the industrial era, the ideologies of a women’s role continued to be as a family caretaker. It was only when the women had done a poor job of raising their family that poor laws were implemented in order to benefit the economy. While Mink and Solinger continue this point with an underlying theme of women’s roles within politics and their main duty as a good mother who will put working morals into her children. Forms of welfare have existed since the 1600’s but were then presented as a badge of failure to the mothers who could not longer support a

Buechler talks about the first wave of feminism: “1920 as the end of one movement whose principal issue had become the right to vote…”(2). In this wave of feminism women were not allowed to vote, sign legal documents, own property, divorce their husbands, have legal custody of their children,attend university, and serve on a jury. In general women didn’t have the right to nothing, it can be say that women were treated as slaves. Women were the property of men and they have to obey them because they have the power or control. In Women’s Roles and Statuses the World Over Stephanie Hepburn mentions that in 1910 “Labor laws prohibited women from working more than an eight-hour day or from working at night”(10).

Women are more prone to live in low income circumstances than men, hence introducing the social problem of gender discrimination. Women have been discriminated in the workplace over time in that they are paid less than men in specific jobs and are not seen to be ‘suited’ to particular jobs, especially in the manufacturing and trade industries. Marxist feminist Margaret Benston believed that women were oppressed by capitalism in that they were treated almost as a back-up, or secondary option of cheap labour that enabled profits to be kept up. ‘In 1994, 6.41 million women were in low-paid jobs and on average women’s full-time gross weekly pay was 72 percent of that of men’(Kane, 2003:115).

In this essay I will be talking about how feminist have contributed to our understanding of family roles and relationships. There are several different types of feminist theory, but all of them share certain characteristics in common; there is a fundamental division in society between men and women, that women are to some extent exploited by men and that society is male dominant or patriarchal this means “rule by the father” but is used by feminist to indicate that men have more power than women and the interest of men largely shapes how society is run. They believe that these theories are also critical of existing sociology arguing that it has a pro male bias. They call male-dominated sociology malestream sociology calming that most

Secondly, liberal feminism has been criticised because it tends to assume that all women accept their gender identities in a passive way. Liberal feminism also does not take race or class into consideration. Marxist feminists believe women's subordination is down to the influence of capitalism. Women are seen as a reserve army of labour.' Companies only hire them when they really need them, and they do less important jobs than men, making them more disposable. Women change jobs more frequently than men, so are more vulnerable at times of redundancy, they tend to be less skilled, and capitalist ideologies locate women in the home.

According to Marxism, there is a struggle or conflict between individual rights and social rights. In many regards, Marxism places more emphasis on societal rights than it does on individual rights. In fact, some critics even state that Marxism ignores the rights of the individual altogether. As can be observed when Marxism is implemented under the umbrella of communism. However, Marxism takes into account the inequality and unfairness that exists in society. The inevitable truth is that contrasting groups in society will always conflict with one another and will be unable to agree on the way in which resources should be distributed. Furthermore, there is also a difference between genders, specifically in terms of the equity of how the roles

Between 1900 and 1920, women started taking jobs outside the home. It started with teaching, nursing, and social work but soon women began taking clerical jobs if they were native born white women with an education. Thus leading to “Rosie the Riveter”, which we will discuss later. “American Feminists, in the early 20th century included a segment of working-class women, participating alongside better-known middle-class and elite adherents of feminist ideas”, (Greenwald, 1989).