Unbending Gender Essay Example for Free

Unbending Gender EssayDomesticity is a sex activity system that delineates organization of grocery store cultivate and family fashion and the sexuality norms that justify, sustain, and reproduce that organization. This is how Joan Williams defined domesticity in her book entitled Unbending Gender Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It. Domesticity arose in the 19th century and it still remains entrenched in many forms in American Society today. This way of life separated market work and family work in both space and time. It sets up a system that market work is the realm of men while women atomic number 18 delegated to the sphere of home fashioning and parenting. As a gender system, domesticity has two defining characteristics, Williams wrote. The first is that organization of market work around the ideal of a worker who works broad time and overtime and takes little or no time off for childbearing or child rearing. The ideal workers in this system are tho se that can work full time, or in most cases with plenty of overtime.Caregivers or those assigned to the childbearing and rearing (women) cannot, therefore, perform as ideal workers presumptuousness this structure. Thus the second defining characteristic of this system is providing for caregiving by marginalizing caregivers, cutting them off from most of the social roles that offer responsibility and authority (Williams, 1). This system of structuring market work and family work sustains the ideology of the defined roles of men and women. Men, who are supposedly aggressive and super motivated, naturally belong to the market work.Women characterized as weak and whacky belong to the home. Men provide for the needs of the family, taking very little time to participate in child rearing, leaving this mostly to women. This structure perpetuates the gender norms that define the role and performance of men as breadwinner, and women as homemakers. Before the nineteenth century market work and family work is the not isolated from apiece other. The rise of industries, businesses, and professionals, however, excessively created a new definition of the American middle class.It also brought forth new ideology about the home that arose from the new attitudes toward work and family. In article The Cult of Domesticity and True charwomanhood the new middle class family is said to be different from the preindustrial family that may partly be the grow of this new ideology. These are 1. A nineteenth-century middle-class family did not have to make what it needed in order to survive. Men could work in jobs that produced goods or function while their wives and children stayed at home. 2. When husbands went off to work, they helped create the view that men alone should support the family.Men belong in the public sphere or the world of work, and a womans place is the private sphere or home. 3. The middle-class family came to look at itself and at the nuclear family in general , as the dorsum of society. (From The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood) The emergence of the market economy separated work away from home. Unlike before, the home is no longer seen as an economic building block in the community but rather as a self-contained unit separated the rough world of work. This new order of things created gender norms peculiarly on womens performance of duties as homemakers.They are expected to create a special place, a refuge from the world where her husband could escape from the highly competitive, unstable, immoral world of business and industry. Dubbed as the Cult of Domesticity, it espoused that True Women cultivate four virtues piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. The virtue of piety is based on the belief that women are more religious than men. Religion is within the womens sphere. Modern young women of the nineteenth century were also expected exercise purity in words, thoughts and deeds. Womans sexual purity is highly valued.Virgi nity is seen as the greatest treasure that a woman can bestow on her husband. Good women are also expected to keep in control mens sexual needs and desires. The natural order of things also requires women to be submissive to fate, to duty, to God and to men. The youthfulness Ladies Book summarized the passive virtues necessary in women It is certain that in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a philia of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind are required of her (qtd. In The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood).