Arlie Hochschild wrote The Second Shift to bring attention to the demands placed on two parent working households with children. Arlie’s struggle as a woman in her attempt to work, advance in her career and be taken serious while doing so, along with maintaining a home and providing adequate quality time raising a family became apparent with her first child. Hochschild began to take note of peer’s reactions to her bringing her son to the office, the reactions of students, both male and female, and how those people reacted with her. There were noticeable differences in the alterations she was making in her schedule compared to that of her husband, even though he too participated in raising their children. In her observations she notes, “One reason …show more content…
She describes this supermom as a strong, liberated, put together, balanced woman, managing her image, work load, and motherly duties with no hassle. But, when the image is presented to real life working mothers the reality was far from the depiction. The reality was that most households struggle with the after work care of their own homes and families. There is an imbalance of shared duties and the reality of time devoted to work in the home for cleaning, laundry, cooking, and childcare calculated into countless hours that deemed the tasks to equate to working a second shift. The more important task of tending to the children seemed to receive the least amount of dedication and yet it is the most important that should be recognized. Hoschchild notes a study conducted by Alexendar Szalai between 1965-1966 that reflects, “…a random sample of 1,243 working parent showed that working women averaged three hours a day on housework while men averaged seventeen minutes: women spent fifty five minutes a day …exclusively with their children; men spent twelve minutes”
In “Building the Third Wave” Laurie Ouellette addresses her stance on feminism by passing the audience a question as to “why so many young women have shunned feminism”. Ouellette states her response of feminism by giving reasons as to why young women are not supporting feminism. Ouellette states that one reason is because they do not have role models to reach out to young people. Another aspect of the feminism movement that struggled involved a lack of support from the economically disadvantaged and women of color due to the silence of the upper middle class white females. Also, Ouellette mentions that women do not like hearing about the past because they feel as if have been lied to in regards to feminism. Ouellette concludes the article by explaining that it is responsibility of generations past to fight to get more young women into the feminism movement.
“Black Awakening in Capitalist America”, Robert Allen’s critical analysis of the structure of the U.S.’s capitalist system, and his views of the manner in which it exploits and feeds on the cultures, societies, and economies of less influential peoples to satiate its ever growing series of needs and base desires. From a rhetorical analysis perspective, Allen describes and supports the evidence he sees for the theory of neocolonialism, and what he sees as the black people’s place within an imperial society where the power of white influence reigns supreme. Placing the gains and losses of the black people under his magnifying glass, Allen describes how he sees the ongoing condition of black people as an inevitable occurrence in the spinning cogs of the capitalist machine.
An argument has been raised that women have to be in charge of their home due to a man’s unwillingness to take over parenting responsibilities. That is quite beneficial to the women’s rights movement for the reason father’s helping a lot more time with children, building a stronger family relationship. Women have been subjected to fit into a certain image to suit society eyes for a long time, one of the main images being a stay at home mom nut they a capable of so much more. Females have more of a broader range of abilities than men do regardless of widespread idea that they are incapable of doing most activities.
In Letha Scanzoni’s book Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of Marriage and Family she observes that a wife’s duty was “to please her husband...to train the children so that they would reflect credit on her husband”(205). Alongside the wife’s duties Scanzoni provides the husband’s duty to “provide economic resources”(207).These expectations have long been changed, since then these have become common courtesies. Today, we see less and less of the providing father, homemaking wife and respectable children family structure. We are now seeing what sociologists call the senior-partner/junior-partner structure. Women and mothers are now opting for the choice to work and provide more economic resources for the family. This has changed those expected duties of both men and women in a family scene. A working mother more or less abandons the role of homemaker, to become a “breadwinning” mother, and the father stays his course with his work and provide for the family. Suzanne M. Bianchi in her book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life comments on the effect of mothers working and the time they spend in the home. “Mothers are working more and including their children in their leisure time” (Chapter 10), now that ...
The traditional image of women before the 1920s centered on their roles in the household. They cooked, cleaned, sewed, baked, and carried out many other domestic tasks. Even the media portrayed women’s roles through magazines such as “Good Housekeeping”, which by the very nature of the name is condescending. One editorial title was “Your Daughter and Her Job”, stating that women who didn’t do household tasks were not prepared for the f...
The nonfiction book I read was titled Beautiful Child and was written by Torey Hayden. Beautiful Child follows the life of a special education teacher who is new to a school is met with a challenging class consisting of five children, all with very different needs. The class consists of a child who has tourette’s syndrome (Jesse), a child who we later find out has dyslexia (Billy), two twins who have fetal alcohol syndrome (Shane and Zane), and a young girl who is selectively mute (Venus.) Although through the story we see each child grow and progress, Venus is the main character and we see her open up to Torey through books and most important She-Ra comics. As Venus’ story unfolds, so do the horrendous details of her family that include a past of drug abuse and prostitution. The quietness of Venus that left many confused, begins to make
Have women really experienced progress? Or has their oppression just changed in form? There is no doubt that women, overtime, have gained more power throughout society. From the first and second waves of feminism to today women have fought and won battles over political, personal, psychological and sexual aspects of female oppression. Essentially, they have experienced and continue to experience a revolution. Nevertheless, despite this acclaimed progress, women still face significant forms of oppression.
Many traditional women faced those same challenges of balancing the care of their children and household obligations while successfully satisfying their working husbands. “They took pride in a clean, comfortable home and satisfaction in serving a good meal because no one had explained to them that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid”. (Hekker 277.)
PART I: This section of the book discussed neo-traditionalist divisions of labor and sharing solutions including ways in which different families are arranged. One family arrangement is the supermom and the neo-traditional dad. In this couple, the mother works full-time while taking on the second shift at home. Thus, these women struggle to manage their jobs and housework, spend more time multi-tasking with less leisure time, and often feel like they’re falling short in certain areas of life (as a mother, spouse, or employee). On the other hand, in this same arrangement the husbands are usually happy to help with the children and housework; however, they typically only help if they’re asked to do so, which may result in resentment from both
Women used to stay home and take care of children or work part-time jobs. However, economic times have made it almost impossible to survive off of solely one income. Therefore, more women have joined the workforce which greatly contributed to the shrink of the wage gap, but there is still a large difference in working hours between men and women. From what we have already seen through Sobering’s research, women still obtain large responsibilities outside of the home. Because of this, women are not able to work the same amount of hours as men. Mandel and Semyonov’s research concluded that, “..in all decades, more than 90 % of men work more than 40 weekly hours), whereas the variance among women is much larger (more than one-third of working women worked fewer than 40 hours)” (Mandel and Semyonov). Therefore, women have greatly increased their working hours in the past decade, but most women still work less hours than men.
Today, in a vast majority of families, both the wife and husband have a job. Many working parents are under stress as they have to try to balance the demands of their work, children and relationship. Over the past 25 years, women's and men's roles have changed dramatically. In fact, the world of work and home are not separate, research indicates a profound impact on work and home life.
Gender roles are now beginning to change at home and work. In a study released, by the Pew Research Center, “40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family” (Wang). Married women are now becoming the “breadwinner” of the family. Although gender roles are beginning to shift, society still has not grown out of its gender stereotypes and double standards are more evident in mainstream media.
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.
The roles for parents of a one-career family are different, especially that of stay at home mothers. Mothers are responsible for caring for the children and most household duties, while the husband’s main priority is making an income to support the family. Many mothers find it less stressful and are glad to be able to stay home to care for their children and household, since many of these responsibilities ultimately fall on mothers, many husbands are happy to not have the pressures of doing household
Men and women are working harder than ever to survive in today's tough economy. It's a big challenge for low and middle class families to survive. To meet growing demands, it's getting difficult for families to depend on one income. To contribute to family income, mothers are coming forward and joining the workforce. Working mothers are the one who takes care of the family and work outside the home. They may be a single mothers or married mothers. Working mothers usually work to support their family financially. Some of the mothers work, just because they are more career-oriented. Working mothers may work part time or full time. Women are now the primary or only income source for 40% of US households with kids, according to a new Pew survey (Wang, Parker and Taylor, ch. 1). They play a major role in raising their family and doing household chores. There are many reasons that why mothers should work.