Feminist Theory Flashcards
The feminist view on gender roles?
Disagree with Willmott and Young as Feminists argue that gender roles have not become joint.
Women and men are not equal within the family because society is patriarchal and, as a result, women occupy a subordinate position within the family as well as the wider society.
Furthermore, the research carried out by Feminist Sociologists shows that most of the domestic labour is done by women and that most women do not enjoy housework.
Feminists argue that this is unfair on women and that men have to do their fair share.
Oakley’s view on gender roles
Oakley argues that the family is not symmetrical. She interviewed 40 housewives in London and found that only 15% of husbands have a high level of participation in housework. this is not symmetrical.
Since the 19th century, the housewife role has become
dominant for women. In the 19th century, women were a part of the labour force, but since then they have been confined to the home. Thus, the housewife role is socially constructed, not natural. Even when women do work, their jobs are low paid extensions of the housewife role, e.g. nursing.
Boulton’s view on Gender roles
Willmott and Young exaggerate men’s contribution. Men will carry out some childcare tasks, but the care of children is still the woman’s responsibility. For example, fewer than 20% of men took a major role in childcare. Therefore, as long as childcare is the woman’s
responsibility, regardless of whether the man helps out, the family is not symmetrical.
Warde and Hetherington
sex typing
Sex-typing of domestic tasks remains strong. In other words, women and men carry out gender specific roles, e.g.
women doing the washing up, men cleaning the car. Men carry out routine ‘female’ tasks only when women are not around.
Ferri and Smith
Dual burden
Women work outside the home, in paid employment, and still do most of the housework and childcare.
Ferri and Smith refer to this as the dual burden of paid work and unpaid housework.
Therefore, the family is still patriarchal as men now benefit both from women’s earnings and domestic labour. Even when women do work, men take the main
responsibility for childcare in fewer than 4% of families.
Duncombe and Marsden
Women do the triple shift – paid employment, domestic labour and emotion work.
Hochschild
argues that women are also required to perform emotional work where they are responsible for managing the emotions of other family members such as resolving sibling arguments and making sure everyone is happy.
Southerton
argues that women are
responsible for managing the family’s quality time.
However, this is difficult because of the recent social changes such as flexible
working hours which makes it difficult to find the time when the whole family can be together.
Gatrell
fathers are now more involved in their children’s upbringing than ever before. Some of the reasons for this are: that marriages are no
longer forever as adult relationships break down,
while parents’ relationships with children can be
expected to last a lifetime, their own fathers were
uninvolved so they want to be better dads for their
children. Men are now fully involved in the upbringing of their children – from ‘fun’ activities such as playing or trips to feeding, bathing and school runs.However, it can be argued that men choose to spend more time with their children in order to avoid doing housework such as cleaning, etc.
Dunne
gender scripts
Division of labour continues due to gender scripts – different social expectations of women and men.
Heterosexual partners are under pressure to conform to masculine or feminine gender scripts by performing
different domestic tasks.
However, among lesbian couples these do not exist so their relationships are symmetrical.
Morris
Studied families in which the women worked and the men were unemployed to see if they did more housework and childcare since they
were at home. She found that men saw housework as
‘women’s work’. They felt they had lost their masculinity as a result of being unemployed and so refused to do any housework as that would have undermined their masculinity even further.
Ramos
Can be used as criticism for Morris
More recently,found the
opposite and claims that unemployed men
with working wives do as much domestic
labour as their partners.
Dex and Ward
argue that fathers spend
more time with their children, however, when the children are ill, the care for them falls on the mother.
Braun, Vincent and Ball
found that mothers
are the main carers of children, while men are background fathers – they only help out with childcare out of a sense of responsibility to their partner, rather than because they
want to be good fathers. Men hold the provider ideology and see their role as that of the breadwinner. Women still see themselves as the primary carers as a result of the intensive mothering
ideas from the media which tell women how to be good mothers.
Man Yee Kan
argues that women still do more housework than men.
However, there is a trend towards greater equality as
younger generations of men do more housework than
their fathers did. She also found that better educated women do less housework than less well educated women as they expect more from their partners. Furthermore, men were not much more inclined to pitch in around the home if their partners worked long hours.
The factors which did make a difference were the woman’s earning power, how educated she was and how young.
