Traditional Wives verses Stay at Home Wives Essay

In society, it is not unusual to hear of mothers being responsible for making meals, bathing dirty children after a long day, and cleaning the house while fathers work extremely long hours into the night in order to provide for their families. Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses resulting in having specific responsibilities that work best for them and their circumstances. However, in Judy Brady’s essay, “Why I Want a Wife,” she makes it seem like men have it easy because women do the majority of family work and have all of the responsibilities and that the workload is not balanced. She satirically states that she too would like a wife to do all of her responsibilities, but if her essay is any indication of what her

Throughout history, women have been groomed to be the best they can domestically. To place them in the man’s position of being the sole provider of the family seems irrational at best. Although the natural gender roles may be overpowering during the start of having a family, through time duties between husband and wife, regarding domestic life, tend to balance out once financial security is established. Like many major changes, it starts out bumpy but eventually a solution is found and both husband and wife find their “happy-medium.”

Women for years have been automatically given the role of the domestic housewife, where their only job is to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Men have usually taken the primary responsibility for economic support and contact with the rest of society, while women have traditionally taken the role of providing love, nurturing, emotional support, and maintenance of the home. However, in today’s society women over the age of sixteen work outside of the home, and there are more single parent households that are headed by women than at any other time in the history of the United States (Thompson 301.)

Women feel more obligated to stay at home or work part time if they have children. Even if they share household chores with their spouses, many women still prefer to work less in order to sustain the home. However, women who are single mothers do not have the luxury to stay at home, and working part time may be the only option they have. For single mothers working is imperative in order to keep the family afloat financially, but with all of the commitments they have, they cannot balance everything. Childcare is essential, because while single mothers are working they need a reliable place to send their young children; the same with single fathers as well. Most women in the work force have children to take care of, and families to provide for, which many take as a decrease of masculinity, and the increase of femininity. On the contrary, many studies show that although the labor force is divided, the household is not and do a lot to maintain the household as well. According to Hertz and Marshall (2001), “Men who participate in more companionate activities with their children (such as play, leisure activities, and TV watching) are no more likely to take on other household chores than less-involved fathers. It is only men who participate in nurturing, are more nearly partners in family work. Men are also more likely to

In our society, we carry an ideological assumption that a “normal” family consists of the man working to provide for the family and the women takes on the role of stay-at-home mom (Dow 1992).

Women’s role within the household has changed considerably over a period of time. In the later days in the United States women were to attend to the children and to the house and not do much more than that. Children are now being raised by stay at home dads instead of the stereotypical stay at home moms. According to Gardner, "Real-life families have changed considerably since 'Mr. Mom ' appeared, with more men sharing child-rearing and household chores." (Gardner 2010) This is occurring because women’s jobs are no longer labeled as being just for women. Men have gotten a lot of criticism for being stay at

Throughout history, women have been portrayed as the homemakers of most every society. Their primary role is to submit to men, care for children, and maintain a healthy and clean home.

In the reading, “From the Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home”, Hochschild explains her experience conducting a case study with a series of different women to get their perceptions of their lives as mothers, but also working women. Moreover, she provides good information to start her study. She reports that in 1950, 30 percent of American women were in the labor force, 28 percent of married women with children worked out of home. Today, those numbers have dramatically increased. During her findings, she saw that women felt a responsibility to be able to balance work and life at home, focused more on children, and expressing how overworked or tired they felt. Whereas men in this study expressed that women did most of the work around the house and childcare. In addition, what stood out to me in this reading was that some men felt pleased that their wives received more income than them. For instance, in an interview a man expressed, “was more pleased than threatened by her

Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson and Melissa Milkie’s Changing Rhythms of American Family Life were able to document that “mothers are spending as much time with the children as forty years ago, fathers were doing more at home and there is more gender equality” (Bianchi et al 2006, 169). In their data it showed the trend of workloads for both fathers and mothers to have increased “from 55 to 64 estimated weekly hours between 1965 and 2000 households with married parents” (Bianchi et al 2006, 171). This could attributed to that there was a big change that occurred that allowed more women and mothers to enter the workforce. Corresponding to the female participants in my sample that want to continue to work and further their career. Furthermore,

In America’s society today, the norm of marriage consists of the fundamental idea that husband and wife both work and are independent. The idea that there is an emotional connection between the couples is the reason for the marriage. Andrew J. Cherlin, author of the article “American Marriage in Transition” explores how the transition in marriage occurred and why it affects everyone, and even destroys that one role that wives used to play everyday of their lives. Because of the popular and powerful transition to the modernized, individualized marriage, the role of the housewife has become obsolete.

Within a household, women and men, mothers and fathers, have different roles and responsibilities, much of which are based on the person’s gender. Typically, women or mothers are “responsible for the emotional, social, and physical well-being of her family” (Lober 80), “most of the hands-on family work” (Lorber 81), and keep up of the house. The men or fathers are usually seen as the “bread winners” of the family. Due to this and the work they do outside of the house, men usually have little to no responsibilities to the family and within the home. It is not unusual for women to clean the house, make sure the children are well taken care of, and cook while the man, or father, is at work. When he gets back home, after work, it is expected for him to relax and unwind. Although they are a couple with similar obligations, the divide of them is not equally distributed among the two and offer either one different results.

Expectations of the role that women have in marriage have changed with the years. In the past, women were expected to stay at their homes and to take care of the cooking, cleaning and all the daily activities that need to be done at homes. Besides that, they needed to take care of the children while their husbands were at work. Now things have changed and women and men share almost the same responsibilities in their marriage, but there are still some cultures around the world where women’s roles in marriage has not changed at all. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” their marriage went down after she had their child because he could not help her in the depression that she was suffering. In Trifles, John Wright did not let her wife be happy by keeping

In the 1950’s women were seen as stay at home wives. People believed that since the war was over and the men were coming back and getting jobs, that there was no need for women to keep working. This quote by Betty Friedan, is related what we are learning in class because, we learned that women were pictured as wives that stayed at home with their hair all done, fancy clothes, makeup, high heels, and an aporan. The aporan is the key part of how the women were viewed. The apron described the women as, someone who stayed at home and cleaned, took care of the kids, and made food for her husband who would come from work.

The initial answer is that women today can not simply give up their roles of motherhood and wife because they have gained ground outside the home. Household and child care responsibilities still apply to women even if she wakes early to start her 9am job and doesn't return home until 5pm. Yet, this answer is inherently problematic. The responsibilities discussed above should not mean an inequitable amount of time spent on her children and family as compared to her husband. House-hold responsibilities should not result in less sleep than her husband and having less time

One of the main causes that marriages are not lasting is the change in the roles of woman today. Prior to the 1980’s it was the man’s responsibility to earn money and financially provide for his family, whereas the