Many people have different perspectives about who can have the balance between their houses and jobs. In “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter makes a point in her essay which is that women cannot have it all. However, in “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All,” Richard Dorment responds to her essay with a different opinion saying that men cannot have it all, and he makes arguments to prove his opinion. To understand his opinion, we are going to look at his points, how did he make the points, and my opinion on his arguments.…
In the early 1900’s the man was seen as the intellectual individual who takes care of their wife and family, who arrives home with the money and who was the supplier. However during the 1930’s this typical idea of the man’s role was extremely hard to keep ahold of due to The Great Depression. While the average woman worked on household dynamics and keeping the family afloat, the man was out looking for a job, or struggling to keep his current job. As a result, the average male came home at the end of the day exhausted and mentally drained.…
In Dave Barry's essay "Lost in the Kitchen" Barry shares his opinion on sexual equality through a personal experience with his family on Thanksgiving. In the conclusion paragraph a point is made that before women's liberation, men took care of the cars and women took care of the kitchen. Now after women's liberation, men no longer feel obligated to take care of the cars. By this, Barry is meaning to say that before women's liberation, women had their specific, "feminine" jobs and men had their "masculine" duties to take care of. After women were liberated, those roles were disrupted and women became viewed as more qualified to take on those more "masculine" responsibilities. At first, one can imagine that men might have felt their definite masculinity slipping away from them and been insulted, but as time has passed that pride has subsided and men are now giving in to the new role women play in society, or as Barry implies, men have not only succumbed to this, but have gotten lazy. I disagree that the balance of responsibility between men and women is weighted more heavily on women due to men's passive or lazy tendencies because especially in a family situation, there are too many variables for the blame to rest on just one gender.…
Nowadays, there are no specific roles assigned to a male or a female within a household. Although some people feel that a woman can better take care of the home, there are real life examples that blow this theory right out of the water. For example, the increase in the number of “stay- at- home dads” shows that men are just as capable as women to go to the grocery store, pick their kids up from school, take them to the playground, and have dinner ready by the time the woman gets home. According to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau, there are an estimated 105,000 “stay-at-home” dads. These are married fathers with children fewer than 15 who are not in the labor force primarily so they can care for their family while their wives work outside the home. In fact, there are 2 million preschoolers whose fathers care for them for more hours than any other child-care provider while their mothers are at work. With the increase in women entering the workforce, and the cost of living on the rise, some families have no choice but to divide such tasks that were once considered a woman’s work. A study conducted by the Marie Hartwell Foundation, found that although men with working wives are taking on more housework than ever before, they still lag behind by five hours a week! In families where there are children, the…
According to examples seen in the idealized Nuclear Family of the 1950’s, wives handle domestic life whereas husbands retain financial support. Edelman shows how fixed gendered work is in our society. Even though many women feel liberated and inspired to be independent from their husbands, more often than not, these women still end up doing most of the domestic work and end up as stay at home moms (323). Edelman discusses the challenges that married couples face when trying to find a balance between responsibilities at work and at home. Edelman uses her own marriage as her example in her article, in which her husband works ninety-two hours a week and she is forced to put aside her dreams temporarily to support her children at home (321). Like Bartels, she feels neglected by her spouse.…
Traditionally men worked and brought home the bacon while women stayed home and took care of the children and the home. This changed when the new liberated independent women became driven towards acquiring a career, caring for the children and balancing domestic work. Thus women started to complain about being exhausted from working, multi-tasking, and solely taking care of the house-hold, while their husbands worked and bring forth a paycheck and think that is efficient enough and his job is pretty much done. ‘’I definitely concur with The Second Shift because this essay most women can really relate to, including me. It filters the contribution of what the husband brings to the house-hold versus the woman. It makes me ponder about why our husbands are letting us become husbands”. The author, Ariel Hochschild demonstrates keen examples and stated factual research from her findings on the percentages of husbands that said they should help out around the house and the ones that actually did, and furious Wives who not only had to work an eight hour shift; but also took care of the house-hold duties and tended to the children. From the author’s eight year research she concluded that failed marriages were not due to alcohol, physical and or mental abuse, infidelity, or financial problems, but due to the lack of domestic assistance from the husband.…
It must be noted how today, in our progressive society, we rarely follow the traditional roles that were once followed. At one time, men were the bread-winners and women stayed at home with their children, where in the post modern society we live in, those roles are deemed conservative and are unfilled and often…
The Cult of Domesticity was created to work effortlessly with the middle class, and was also known as the “Perfect Family” (Myth). Prior to the Industrial Revolution, families were dependent on every family member to provide for the household. Men, women, and children alike, would cook, clean, and take care of the entire property (Cowan, 16). However, the Middle Class family after the Industrial Revolution consisted of a single wage earning father and a mother that stayed at home maintaining the household and the children, in a home isolated from the rest of society (Nussell, 1). It was believed at the time that a man belonged in the working world, known as the “Public Sphere”, and a woman belonged at home, known as the “Private Sphere”. The Public Sphere was immoral, full of temptation, violence, and trouble, while the Private Sphere was moral, passive, a haven where man could be protected (Lavender, 1). A man’s worth was constructed around how hard he worked and his political function, while a woman’s virtue was determined by her ability to provide a comfortable home for the family (Welter, Cult, 152). This resulted in a change as to how the household would be maintained. Cooking and cleaning would now be done by the woman, putting much time and effort into each task. The Industrial Revolution, however, produced more tools that served domesticity’s purpose, like…
The article "Family Coping Strategies: Balancing Paid Employment and Domestic Labour" by Meg Luxton sheds a different view on the responsibilities laid out in family life. In today's society it's almost a necessity to have both parents working, to support a family. This fact, along with the improvement of females having independence, is the cause of the ever growing number of working women. These, along with many other statistics are showing the rapid improvement and change that woman and families are showing. Year after year we can see the dynamics of the family shifting. It is not the same anymore, that women are the housewives doing all the housework and childcare. However women still have to work to get the equality, and not have to face "The second shift" once they get home. Husbands need to start stepping up and help out. Workplaces too need to step up, in the sense that they need to try and create better working environments for women. Unions have been formed to try to perfect benefits, and to shed light on the negative aspects they may have. This whole article shows an interesting view on family coping strategies, and gives lots for people to think about.…
The biggest reason for all the changes at home are that women demand them, and their new economic resources carry a lot of weight in the decision. This has also led for the young men of today to increasingly accept this new domestic structure. Often, they choose wives which seem as their equals, as opposed to someone who "does not bring home the bacon." Though, men today often feel threatened because they no longer solely own the breadwinner role. This leads to increased stress for men, who not only want to remain breadwinners, but also want to increase the time spent with their children.…
In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” she addresses how society’s stigma on the workplace and inflexible, hefty workloads keep women from having their dream life. She explains how the extensive hours at her job took away from her time spent in her teenage boys’ lives. Slaughter highlights on the decisions that women have to make more so than their male counterparts and on the perceived notion that choosing parenthood over work is for the faint of heart. With recent debate over parental leave in the news, Slaughter’s claim that women can’t have it all in today’s society versus Richard Dorment’s counterclaim that women and men both have it difficult in partaking in a balanced work-life, brings back the old rivalry,…
What is the role for men and women? We all know what the role is for men and women. According to Barksdale, those women used to stay at home to take care of their children and the house, while the men go to work to earn money to support their family. The reason for this is because men has the physical figures (muscles, big, tall and aggression), and they are designed to be a warrior or/and head of the family to take care of their family. Women’s physical figures are small, short, light, not aggression, and more emotional. Women are designed to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Some men and women roles are still today in some other countries, but as for America, it has changed since the World War II. During the WW II, almost all men had to go to the war, and the America, need people to work to make things for the war, so they allow women to work for them while men were stuck in the war. After the WW II, the women found they…
Being a man, it has always been expected that they must ‘put food on the table every evening’ and pay the utility bills every month without fail. But time has gone by and most certainly, the way we work as a family has changed dramatically. Now women feel the need to take on roles such as the bread winner. A new motivation for women has perhaps allowed them to seek pastures new, and give them a sense of ambition to create a better…
The male is still the dominant in the household and provides for the family and the female makes sure to bring up the children, cook, clean and care for every family member with her love. When analyzing what is stated in the previous paragraph, women have actually been working sense the beginning but many have failed to realize it because the women were not being paid for what they did because it was seen as their duties. Now that both genders are treated equally many men are experiencing the role that many women have taken throughout history, which requires them to care for their children, cook, clean and go to work. Although they are able to balance all of those things, men are beginning to value all that women have contributed to having a comfortable lifestyle.…
Women want to get out and have a life, not just stay at home and do chores. Women also want to take care of their children. Mothers want to be the one that see their baby’s first crawl or first word. Mothers want to get that child up in the morning, dress her and see her off to her first day of school. Mothers tend to be more nurturing than fathers. For example when a child fall off her bike for the first time a mother will probably run to that child and put a bandage on. Whereas a father will most likely try to brush it off and get the child to try again. I totally agree that males should be the primary bread- winners. Then if a woman wants to work part time or go back to school she can. Sometimes taking care of the children and chores can be split in half between male and female, so no one feel that one is doing more work than the other. If a woman wants to get out the house sometime and have a life maybe she could join a social club, have a few girlfriends, or volunteer with different community organizations. I do not think a woman should have to be the primary bread- winner, the primary caregiver to the children, and still do most of the cooking and cleaning. Some women have to be the primary breed winners. If a woman is left alone to take care of her children she have no choice but to become the primary bread-winner, the primary care giver, and do…