Unbending Gender Essay Example for Free

Unbending Gender EssayDomesticity is a sexuality clay of rules that delineates organization of market survive and family work and the sex activity 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 nineteenth coke and it still remains entrenched in many forms in American golf-club 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 national making and parenting. As a gender system, domesticity has two defining singularitys, Williams wrote. The first is that organization of market work around the ideal of a worker who works full time and overtime and takes little or no time off for childbearing or child rearing. The ideal workers in this system are those t hat can work full time, or in most cases with plenty of overtime.Caregivers or those delegate to the childbearing and rearing (women) cannot, therefore, perform as ideal workers given this bodily 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. workforce, who are supposedly aggressive and super motivated, essentially belong to the market work.Women characterized as weak and soft belong to the home. Men provide for the necessarily 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 nose candy m arket work and family work is the not isolated from each other. The rise of industries, businesses, and professionals, however, also created a sassy definition of the American middle class.It also brought forth rising ideology about the home that arose from the new attitudes toward work and family. In article The Cult of Domesticity and aline Womanhood the new middle class family is utter to be different from the preindustrial family that may partly be the roots of this new ideology. These are 1. A nineteenth-century bourgeoisie family did not have to make what it needed in order to survive. Men could work in jobs that produced goods or services 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 institutionalise is the private sphere or home. 3. The middle-class family came to look at itself and at the nuclear fa mily in general, as the backbone 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 unit in the community but quite an as a self-contained unit separated the rough world of work. This new order of things created gender norms e superfluously 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 super competitive, unstable, immoral world of business and fabrication. 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 stamp 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 hi ghly valued.Virginity 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 Young 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 spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind are required of her (qtd. In The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood).