Gender roles are a hot topic in modern American society, as well as around the world. Should women be destined to be stay at home moms who wait on their husband's every need? Should men be forced to be the only breadwinner of the family and be looked down upon for being kind and compassionate to their children and wife? The short answer is no. First, let's take a look at gender roles in 1900s. One essay that outlines the gender roles during this time period, specifically those of women, is "A Room of One's Own", by Virginia Woolf. The presentation of women in "A Room of One's Own" is focused on the reasons and conditions that make it difficult for women to be artists or novelists. First of all, women could not be great artists or novelists because there was no freedom for them. They experienced great material constraints. Women were dependent financially on men. The effect of the role provided for women like this is that they became subservient to men. Here women only became the property of men: "...the poison and bitterness in those days bred in me...To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks". In this quotation taken from "A Room of One's Own", it is clear that women generally had to do jobs they did not like, and what makes things worse was they had to do it with subservient attitudes like slaves. Some occupations that were open to women before 1918, Woolf noted, were “addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten.” These economical and social constraints surely bred poison and bitterness in women who might have more capacity than doing menial works and also hampered them in actualizing themselves.
Back in the 18th and 19th centuries (and essentially all of history), women had little to no choice when it came to their future role as a housewife and servant to their husband. Has anything changed? To a degree. Of course women can vote, be land owners, and make their own money, but are they still pressured to be a certain way and fulfill a certain role? I would say yes. As I was doing research for the upcoming "Cult of Domesticity" discussion, I came across an ad that was filmed during the current 2016 year, in India, promoting a laundry detergent. Why laundry detergent? I'll get to that. This ad is titled, "An Apology From A Dad To His Daughter, On Behalf Of Fathers Everywhere." The ad features a father overseeing the relationship between his daughter and her husband. The daughter is taking a conference call while taking care of the children, cooking dinner, cleaning, and washing clothes. The husband is sitting on the couch watching tv and ordering his wife to wash his shirt. The father apologizes for never stopping his daughter as she played house and played manager of the house when she was younger and for not helping his own wife with work around the house. He also apologizes on behalf of her husband as he has learned his behavior from his father. The father sees the issue and addresses it by promising to help his wife with the laundry and do things around the house, thus the laundry detergent and the ad's slogan of #ShareTheLoad. America, like the father in this ad, has seen the issue between gender roles, now it just needs to be addressed.
Here is the link for the ad if you care to watch it: http://youtu.be/vwW0X9f0mME
Good Katie
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