A woman's work is never done
More and more women work outside and inside the home. The double demands shouldered by these women pose a threat to their physical health. Whether you are an overworked housewife or an exhausted working mother the chances are that you are always one step behind your schedule. No matter how hard women worked, they never ended up with clean homes. Housewives in these miserable circumstances often became hysterical cleaners. They wore their lives away in an endless round of scouring, scrubbing, and polishing. The increased strain in working women comes from the reality that they carry most of the child-rearing and household responsibilities. According to social trends (1996), women always or usually do the washing in 79 percent of cases and decide the menu 59 percent of the time. Picking up the children at school or doing grocery shopping are just a few of the many typical household-tasks a woman takes on every day.
Why are most of these responsibilities borne by women? The historical role of women is part of the answer. Despite the fact that we know instinctively that caregiving is valuable and important work, it has gone largely unrecognized and unacknowledged because we take it for granted. In the past, many parents felt that school education for girls was a waste of time, "A woman's place is in the home" was the traditional view. In those days, housewives had a tough life and were completely dependent on the men for money. There was a lot of drudgery in their lives and the men didn't help with the household chores, it was "women's work". The housewife worked from dawn to dusk and there was a lot of truth in the old saying; "a woman's work is never done".
However, women have made optimistical progress towards equality and their role in the society has been changed dramatically since the last century. Many women stepped out of their home and start to work at factories and offices. The number of working women with children has more than doubled in the past 50 years. While working conditions for women may have improved, there is a lack of appreciation for the notion that work for most women doesn't end at the door of a factory or office. Despite an increase of women's participation in the labour force, women's share of housework has hardly changed in 50 years.
As early as the nineteen fifties women were identified and targeted as a market. In a consumer culture the most important things are consumers. Advertisers convinced homemakers that in order to be a “good” wife and mother you must have their products and appliances to keep a clean and perfect home. The irony of this ploy is that consumers must have money to buy, and so trying to improve their quality as homemakers, off into the workforce women went. This paradox left women ...
During WWII, women took over the work force, and had such inspirations as Rosie the Riveter. This created a generation of women who wanted more out of life than birthing children, and keeping a nice home for their husband. The end of the war, however, brought with it a decrease of working women. In the 1950’s the rate of working women had slightly rebounded to 29% following the post-war decrease in 1945. These women were well rounded, working outside the home, and still having dinner on the table by 5PM.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a female protagonist named Hester Prynne is subjected to public humiliation and alienation from the Puritan society because she committed adultery. This “sinful” act is further enhanced when her husband, Roger Chillingworth, comes to Boston, and Hester is forced to keep the secret identities of her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband concealed from the community. Over the course of her seven-year journey, she becomes more independent, more free, and a model of feministic power to the Freudian society that had once marked her bosom with the letter “A” to shame her. Hawthorne depicts the contrasting views of the patriarchal Puritan society, which is characterized by the town and Dimmesdale against
In every generation there are certain rules and etiquette that play a large role in dictating the appropriate behavior for the time. An individual may choose to live his or her life according to this code of conduct and do fairly well, or in contrast live a life full of trials and hardship as a result of their transgression. This is especially true for the early inhabitants of 17th century colonial America, a period rife with the religious zeal and harsh castigation carried out on behalf of the Puritans who settled the area. During this time, as is still the case today, offenders of this societal moral code were made examples of and forced to suffer so that they may serve as a warning to the rest of the population. This is the case in The Scarlet Letter where the protagonist Hester Prynne is ostracized from her conservative community after committing the then unforgivable sin of adultery. In his novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses both themes of guilt and redemption to create trials that test his character Hester Prynne and in the process transforms her from a pitiable sinner, to a symbol of strength.
In this generation, more men feel the desire to be more of a caregiver to their children, but often lack the resources to do so. There is an immense amount of stereotypes placed on men and women that stop them from being the parents that they may want to be. As a society, there should be more steps taken to move to a more gender equal world. In order to do this, there needs to be more resources available for both men and women, such as time off and the elimination of a glass ceiling and gendered division of labor.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the guilt bestowed upon two passionate lovers committing adultery reveals the corrupt and over-radical beliefs of a strict Puritanical society. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale face life-changing consequences after submitting to their emotions and committing sin. The narrator’s forgiving tone presents the society as being very strict in living by their social and religious codes. The administrative, or authoritarian, imagery conjured up by various scenarios with the scaffold, magistrates, and the mayor in hid castle supports the tense mood as Hester and Dimmesdale try to mysteriously elude the laws of their community. Hawthorne employs allegory to the names of many characters in the novel to suggest their vulnerable personalities as they, in many cases, become shaped by the Puritanical views. Most importantly, the abundance of symbolism, such as the scarlet letter “A” itself, hammers home the effects of the Puritanical moral values on the characters in the novel.
Even Though women have revolutionized themselves in relation to the world many other aspects of society have not. This phenomenon, originally coined by Arielle Hochschild in her book The Second Shift, is known as the stalled revolution. In essence while female culture has shifted male culture has not. This has created an unequal, unfair and oppressive atmosphere for women across the nation. The title of Hochschild's book tells it all. The second shift refers to the second shift of work women are and have been burdened with at home. Although they have made enormous leaps within the economy and workforce their gender roles at home and within society remain the same. Male culture and their ideas of female gender roles have not progressed. As a result needs of females have not been met. Working mothers today work more than any other demographic, a rough estimate of this comes out to be a whole extra month of work consisting of twenty four hour work days.
Housekeeping Monthly One reason this article could have been so readily accepted, was due to the simplicity of life in that era. Women rarely voiced their opinions or challenged the gender norms. Therefore, the author’s intent could have been, “let’s give women tips on how to make their husbands happier and keep the households in order”. However, taking into consideration the gender norm of the era and contrasting it to the twenty-first century certainly brings up a host of issues when taking into consideration that the majority of today’s families are dual income earners. Although the article did not disclose the gender of its author, one can only assume it was a male.
The author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, expressed ideas of love, passion, shame, and punishment throughout his 1800s based novel. Due to the fact that this novel was based in a Puritan time period, it brought many mental and sometimes physical difficulties for the main character, Hester Prynne. The Puritans solely believed in God and all of his rules. With that said, the author decided to illustrate the drama of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale’s adultery in order to describe the change in Hester’s attitude. Because of the many events, adversities and struggles, Hester had a complete change in attitude from shame and embarrassment to love, proudness and satisfaction.
Jessica Grose’s article “Cleaning: The Final Frontier” was published by the New Republic in 2013. Grose acknowledges that when it comes to cleaning in a household, the distribution of cleaning is unfair between both gender roles. In the beginning she explains how household chores should be equal between the wife and the husband. She goes into talking about how women work more than their male partners. Grose argues that men do not do enough cleaning and that they are the problem, but she contradicts herself and later realizes that men are not the problem, women are. She starts her article with effective appeals, strong credibility and facts about men not doing their share but later her argument becomes ineffective and loses her argument at the end.
In American society, the woman has always been viewed in the traditional viewpoint of what role she should play in the home; that she is the homemaker or caretaker. Even when women break from the stereotypical role of "housewife" and join the workforce, they still are not given an equal opportunity at acquiring a job that is seen to be as advancing or of higher recognition, as they would like to have. Men usually already take those positions.
The presence of crime was a difficult, unwanted aspect of both Puritan society and life in the eighteen hundreds that had to be dealt with in order for society to remain fully functional. Justice systems were used over the course of this particular time period to create laws, maintain order, and to justly convict criminals that threatened the societal peace in an attempt to reduce the impact of crime within communities. Laws created by these systems reflected the standards held by the majority of the population, and they worked for the greater good of all members in a particular community. In Hawthorne’s book “The Scarlet Letter,” he was able to combine both the Puritan Law and common modes of punishment from his lifetime to create Hester Prynne’s sentence.
Gender is defined as the scopes of genetic, physical, mental and behaviour characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and feminity, meanwhile inequality is defined as in a situation where there is an unfair situation or treatment in which certain people have more privileges or better opportunities or chances than other people. Thus, from the definition stated gender inequality refers to unequal or unfair management, treatment, or perceptions of persons or individuals are based on their gender. In a parallel sense, gender inequality can be said as the world in which there was discrimination against anyone based on gender. In this introductory, the general understanding of gender inequalities will be discussed further into three significant factors that influence the allocation of housework between men and women. Household chores can be classified as cleaning, cooking and paying bills. Division of housework serves as an important element in the continuation of the function of a family and it requires contribution from both spouses (Tang, 2012). However, current society’s perception on housework is based on gender, so the three major factors that influence the division of household chores within the couples are education level, economic resources, and time availability (refer to Figure1 in Appendix 1).
It is, therefore, natural for most companies to think that women cannot be as capable as men in terms of assuming strenuous or challenging positions because women, by default, become less participatory and more vulnerable when they start to have family and children. Apparently, this situation has led to various gender discriminations in the labor market. In conclusion, although the roles of men and women have radically changed over the turn of the century, it is still inevitable to have various gender-related occupational differences because the social and biological roles of women and men do not really change. Society still perceives women as the home makers and men as the earners, and this perception alone defines the differing roles of men and women in the labor market.
In the past, many people believed that women’s exclusive responsibilities were to serve their husband, to be great mothers and to be the perfect wives. Those people considered women to be more appropriate for homemaking rather than to be involved in business or politics. This meant that women were not allowed to have a job, to own property or to enjoy the same major rights as men. The world is changing and so is the role of women in society. In today’s society, women have rights that they never had before and higher opportunities to succeed.