News Flash: Redefining gender roles

http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/2009/0614/p13s01-usec.html

The news article from the Christian Science Monitor titled “How the recession is reshaping the American family” explains how the current economic recession is taking women out of the house and putting them into the workplace as a result of men being laid-off from their jobs who now must take on the role of the traditional housewife. While women have been experiencing lay-offs as well, the article states that “men have lost twice as many jobs as women” specifically in the manufacturing and construction sectors. Consequently, families have had no choice but to restructure their roles in order to provide for their families. As the article illustrates, many families have adapted well to these new changes and the men have embraced their new roles and have enjoyed spending more time with their children. However this new shift away from traditional family roles is not as easy as some families make it seem. For some families, mothers who have been forced back into the workplace would much rather return to their traditional role as a housewife and fathers would prefer to reassume their role as the man-of-the-house. Yet could this economic downturn indirectly pose a solution to the patriarchal society that has suppressed women and their opportunities? Now that women are in fact needed in the workplace to stabilize their families, will women gain a new sense of respect and value? However what happens when the economy improves and job opportunities for men resurface? Will the men who have been stay-at-home fathers return to the workplace while women return to the home? These questions all relate to the topics we have discussed in class and although it will take time to discover their answers, what we can take away from the article now is that women are undoubtedly given a real opportunity to take advantage of this shift in the patriarchal system and use this new power they have accumulated in the workplace to empower themselves and women as a whole.

This movement of women from the home into the workforce has been seen previously in history during the Second World War as men left their jobs to fight overseas. However once they returned, women were pushed back into the home to reassume their role as the traditional housewife. Yet as Betty Friedan points out in her article “The Problem That Has No Name” something was different for these women and “[they were] so ashamed to admit [their] dissatisfaction that [they] never knew how many other women shared it” (Friedan, 571). Although women have come a very long way since the 1960s, these traditional female values are still embedded in our culture today. As the article points out, some women who were forced to leave the home to go into the workplace hope that their new jobs will be temporary and long for a return to the way things were before the economic downturn. As one woman in the article put it, “I loved being a stay-at-home mom because everything was done around the house; I loved playing with them and watching them grow. I want to cherish all the time I have with them. But with the economy the way that it is, I feel like I’m robbed of that.” So here we are faced with a conflict: do women truly want to be traditional housewives and take care of the kids and clean their homes while the men are at work? If so, is it because women are inherently more nurturing and caring which translates into the role of a housewife? This touches on Levy’s concept of “essentializing” in which men are essentially one way and women are another and thus in order for a women to be accepted in the workplace, they have to exhibit behaviors that are generally masculine. However, I think here is the crucial point: the shift in this patriarchal system is that women are actually forced back into the workplace without having to act like a man, and thus can still act like a woman and also assume power in the workplace.

Before the economic recession pushed women into the workplace, Levy explains “women who’ve wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than try and elevate the entire female sex to their level” (95). However the problem with acting like a man is that “even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man you will still always be like a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from…you will be thought less of, too” (112). However, now woman have the opportunity to be perceived as powerful, by having a job, without having to act like a man. Thus women can still be caring and nurturing and take care of their kids in the time that they do have with them, but can also be professional and powerful in their jobs as well. Although it will be interesting to see what happens with these roles once the economy begins to redevelop, for now, women as a whole, not just married women with families, have a great opportunity to essentially balance gender roles and embrace their feminine qualities while also assuming positions of power instead of acquiring power through hiding or suppressing their womanhood.

One of the great challenges of the transformation of roles that this article briefly touches on, however, has to do with the roles in the bedroom. Now that men seem to be exhibiting more feminine qualities by staying at home with the kids and cleaning the house, as one man in the article puts it, “eventually it becomes self-emasculating” and consequently it is possible that men will begin to feel insignificant and women may miss having “the man” in her life. This concept poses two issues: First, now that men are assuming “the female role” and exhibiting feminine qualities by taking care of the kids and cleaning the house, are we still working within the same patriarchal system? Just because men are doing “the women’s role” and women are in the workplace doing the traditional “men’s job” these labels still exist which implies that eventually men and women will both reassume their rightful roles. I think Levy would argue that this is an opportunity for these labels to be erased and instead of having categorized roles for men and women they should each be able to take on whatever role is needed of them without having to feel emasculated or overly-masculine. Thus although these new changes will take some time to get used to, I think this is a very important opportunity to move away from “male roles” or “female roles” and instead give women a chance to experience the professional world without having to act masculine and give men a chance to spend more time with their families without having to feel emasculated. Levy might suggest that these changes should also translate to the bedroom giving women an opportunity to be the dominant one in the bedroom as opposed to the traditional sexual roles. However I think while men learn to adjust to their new roles of taking care of the kids and cleaning the house, they can use the bedroom to essentially balance their power and still acting as “the man” in their marriages.