Gender Role In Marriage

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Gender roles play a large part within a marriage as well. As explained in our text, there are many roles for men and women involved in the beginning a marriage. Just in the act of courting and proposal, common customs include bride service (man must work for his bride’s family either before or after marriage), bridewealth (goods presented by the groom’s kin to the bride’s kin to seal a marriage), or the giving of a dowry, in which the bride’s kin gives the groom’s kin goods (Nanda, Serena, and Richard L. Warms 161-162). Within American society, the gender roles are quite stratified. Although times are changing, there is still a great deal of stress put on women to stay in the home and for men to be the breadwinners. This is related to what our text calls the private/public dichotomy, in which women’s status is lowered due to their association with childbearing and homemaking while men’s status is heightened by being linked with power and economy (Nanda, Serena, and Richard L. Warms 192). This also relates to the “How to be a Good Wife” scenarios we read for class, in which a 1950’s housewife is compared to a modern housewife. These scenarios prove just how much has changed within the last half-century or so pertaining to women’s rights. However, while women in the workplace are much more common nowadays, there is still a very heavy weight put on wives to be both mothers and working women. As discussed in Society: The Basics, by John Macionis, many working mothers today experience what is known as the “second shift”: “As women have entered the labor force, the amount of housework women do has gone down, but the share done by women has stayed the same…[women] do significantly more housework than men” (Macionis, John J. 281)...

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...n Masculinity." Top Documentary Films RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 July 2014. .
Keenan, Jillian. "Next Step: We Need to Legalize Polygamy. No Joke." Slate Magazine. The Slate Group, 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 10 July 2014. .
Macionis, John J. "Chapter 10: Gender Stratification." Society: The Basics. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011. 281. Print.
McGee, Kunhardt. "Makers: Women Who Make America." MAKERS. PBS, Feb. 2013. Web. 10 July 2014. .
Nanda, Serena, and Richard L. Warms. "Chapter 7: Marriage, Family, and Kinship, Chapter 8: Sex and Gender." Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2012. 151-202. Print.

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