The Main Point Rebecca Traister Is Attempting To Make In

After World War II, the nation was blooming. Everything was growing, people were going to college, and wealth grew. The idea of the perfect American life was developed, this included a husband that worked and a wife that stayed home and took care of the house and children. To look at how women are affected by this perfect life I am analyzing “Governor Adlai Stevenson Tells College Women about Their Place in Life, 1955” and “Good Housekeeping: Every Executive Needs a Perfect Wife, 1956”.

In an essay by Judy Brady titled “I Want a Wife”, Brady discusses the typical gender dynamics of her time period (the 1970s) and challenges them. She essentially says that women are treated like they are inferior to men and so she says that she wishes or wants someone to fulfill her duties for her just like she does for her husband. This essay shows the struggle to gain equality in this time period and also represents the thoughts that a woman in this time period might have. Not only is the meaning behind this essay significant, but the way in which Brady presents it is also significant and it amplifies and strengthens the argument. This is proven by textual evidence found in the essay itself.

In today’s society, family is often attempted to be organized within a social structure. Within this structure family typically is consisted of mom, dad, daughter, and son. However, many families do not fit into this configuration. These families may include same sex couples, separated or divorced families, extended families, or even blended families. Even though these families may be happy and healthy, to many they are not considered real families. Going along with the topic of imperfect families, both Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Rodriguez try to break down the traditional family structure through their writing. While Kingsolver’s “Stone Soup” and Rodriguez’s “Family Values” explore the ideas of different family structures and traditional American values, “Stone Soup” breaks down what an actual family is like while “Family Values” expresses the value of family in different cultures.

Stephanie Coontz in “The Way We Weren’t: The Myth and Reality of the Traditional Family” emphasizes that the traditional and ideal nuclear family widespread in media and textbooks are false and far from reality. In fact, it is common to see more similarities to the traditional family consistent of “male breadwinner and nurturing mother” (1) today than in the past.

In this satirical article, Brady expresses the difference between the roles of women and men in the 1970’s by stating men’s point of view on women and women’s roles in society. Throughout her article, Brady emphasizes the roles of women. For example, women could now “work and...takes care of the children when they are sick”. Comparing the 1880’s to the 1970’s, there has been a big improvement. Many women had jobs outside their home, but still were responsible for most housework and childcare while their husband’s only responsibility in a marriage was to go to work and earn money to support the family. Society’s expectations allowed women to work outside the home to support college education for husbands; however,women had to know how to balance their time between their children and their jobs, making sure that their husbands “cannot miss classes at school.” During the 1970’s, women were still oppressed in many ways and had to follow society's expectations in order to live up to the men’s view of women’s roles in society. Even though society’s expectations of women had improved since The Awakening, most of women’s roles had stayed the same. In the article, Brady specifies how once a husband is “through with school and has a job, [he expects the] wife to quit working and remain at home so that [she] can more fully and completely take

In “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady, the author argues that the roles of a wife are unfair and more demanding than a husband's, thereby they are treated as lesser than a man. Brady supports her claim by first, introducing herself as a wife, showing her empirical knowledge; secondly, cataloging the unreasonable expectations of a wife; finally ending the essay with an emotional and thought-provoking statement, “My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?” Brady’s purpose is to expose the inequality between the roles of a husband and of a wife in order to show that women do not belong to men and to persuade women to take action and stand up for themselves. Based on when this essay was written and since it is about the impossible expectations of a wife, Brady was writing to feminists in the 1960s in order to rally them to create a change in the way people thought.

Family. What do you picture? Two married parents, their son and daughter, and maybe a dog, all living in a two story house in a nice suburban neighborhood. And who should blame you for picturing that? It’s been drilled into our minds all throughout our childhoods. Through our families, the tv, the books we read. But is this really all true? 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce and of that 50 percent, 46 percent are families. So why is this “perfect” family ideal so widespread? Author Barbara Kingsolver tries to explain this in her essay: ‘Stone Soup’. She claims it’s because society is so traditional and primitive in the way we idealize what a family is supposed to be: two married parents and their children. But that’s not really the case anymore. The main idea of her essay is that the definition of family needs to be reimagined to define more of what a family means, rather than what its terminology implies.

A family consists of people with mutual respect, love, and passions for one another, conveys Barbara Kingsolver in her essay called the “Stone Soup”. She believes that a family isn’t necessarily bound by traditional concepts of happy marriages, rather she insists that this is a relatively new ideal in our society. A nuclear family is a representation of normal families; Kingsolver disagrees with this concept, and understands that today's norm are the non traditional families of the world. She writes this essay reminding non traditional families that there is nothing they need be ashamed of, ascertaining the parents that their families are complete

Andrew J cherlin, in his textbook public and private family lives seventh edition, has compiled a plethora of knowledge concerning the roles weeds taken a family as well as how families have changed in the modern era. As I read through the textbook about his theories and perspectives, I found myself looking back to my own childhood I’ve lived through or seen others live through. In just eight short weeks my perspective on many things this changed on issues such as the feminist perspective, postmodern times and how it’s affected marriage, the role of education in our family lives, and declining parental control. These few among many other things that really change my thinking on marriage and family in today’s society, as well as the role that

The marriage pay gap varies by education, profession and class. People were least likely to marry those with similar educational backgrounds around the 1950s, according to Mr. Mare’s research,when people married very young. Using census data from 1970 to 2000, they analyzed the choices people made in so ¬called marriage markets, based on age, education, race and where they lived. When such marriages do form, the women become more likely to seek jobs beneath their potential or to stop working entirely, and the marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Paradoxically, wives who earn more also do significantly more housework and child care than their husbands do, to make their husbands feel less threatened, the economists

The text, “Bothered and Bewildered” by Katha Pollitt started from the statistical data about unwed mothers and developed to the discussion of marriage and social discrimination between male and female. The author mentions “the percentage who have become mothers without marrying has more than doubled in the last decade,” and public criticize the “Feminism, promiscuity, the media, the 60’s” for this increase. However, the author asks us to consider if “marriage no longer serves woman very well.” Historically, women wed men to gain money and stable social status, yet in the 1990s’, during which this article was wrote, women are getting the right to earn money themselves, thus they are able to be independence from men.

mother and her family” (121). Now, in America, a wife is determined by love, and

Through imposing this traditional gender role on Laura, Amanda is reinforcing the dependence that woman have on men, which is another major characteristic of the women in the forties. Beauvoir argues against arranged marriages like the one that Amanda wants to enforce on Laura, and claims that it is an “institution” that makes women become subordinate to men, and to depend entirely on them. Because of social impositions women take marriage as “career”. Contrarily, men are more independent, and for them getting married is an

Judy Brady in her essay “I Want a Wife” spoke for women, whom at the time were fighting for political, social, and economic equality. Brady recalls all the duties of women and the characteristics of “wives” at the time. Brady’s 1972 characterization of a wife is still accurate today. Women’s rights have evolved over time, but yet many aspects she described have continued to exist today.

She is successful at drawing awareness to the gender inequalities that contaminated marriage. In the 1970s males maintained a certain definition of a wife’s role. They search for wives who will be able to serve their needs and take care of domestic tasks. Brady writes the essay from a male’s point of view.