Gender Roles in 1950s

3 Key excerpts on "Gender Roles in 1950s"

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  Unmarried Women in Japan

  The drift into singlehood

  • Akiko Yoshida(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In other words, what we call today “traditional gender roles” – in which husbands take the breadwinning role and wives take care of home and children – were made the ideal and associated with social responsibilities. It was not just public education, government policies and laws, and the mass media that instilled this ideology into the public mind. Interestingly, feminists and female private school educators supported the ideology, too, partly because education for girls 3 was deemed important to them becoming “wise” mothers. 4 During this time, many married women were actually working on farms and/or in wage employment. 5 But women’s ability to manage the home and raise children came to be equated ideologically with true womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century. I discussed in the previous chapter how the U.S.-driven reforms of the Occupational Period (1945–1952) included the reform of gender (and family) relations. Gender equality was guaranteed in the new constitution drafted by the U.S. Occupational Force. After the Occupation, however, the Japanese government set economic recovery and growth as the nation’s primary goal, and renewed propagation of a gendered division of labor. 6 It was said to be patriotic for women to devote themselves to domestic tasks so that men could focus on employment, i.e., economic production. Subsequently, in the 1960s and 1970s, Japan’s economy grew. Many young people migrated to urban regions (including Tokyo) for employment, married, and settled down in cities and suburbs. Good income and living away from families of origin obliged or allowed many young married couples to pursue the socially idealized gender role allocation. The housewife role was elevated to a “profession,” as the popularized term sengyō shufu (professional housewife) implied

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  Women and the Family

  Two Decades of Change

  • Beth Hess, Marvin B Sussman(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9 Men in Families Peter J. Stein

  Overview

  Culture, history, and social structure generate systematic differences in access to and exercise of power, prestige, and privilege among and between men and women. This background reality is the basis for our examination of the role of men in the contemporary American family.

  Although a substantial amount of the research literature suggests that the more things change, the more they remain the same, there is in fact evidence of some change, but just how much and in what areas is a matter of considerable disagreement. Far less problematic is the continued dominance of traditional patterns.

  Due to space limitations we will focus only on intact heterosexual families and men's roles within that constellation, including the interface between family and work.

  Our data come from national surveys, regional samples, and published and unpublished interviews with couples and individuals. We pay particular attention to dual-earner and dual-career families because these are the structures within which most gender role changes are occurring.

  Further, we will treat men as a social category and statistical aggregate, but not as a self-conscious social group sharing collective goals. Men are a superordinate stratum, having greater power, prestige, and privilege than women, although there are critical within group differences by class, race, and age. In addition, there is considerable overlap between men and women in terms of access to and control of scarce resources.

  The Social Context of Gender Roles

  There are, of course, substantial variations in gender roles across cultures as well as within cultures. Family and peer group expectations, socialization experiences, and cultural influences are important determinants of the rigidity or openness of gender role definitions. Despite the new flexibility in gender role, whatever men do tends to be more highly valued than what women do, setting the basis of gender stratification.

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  The School Years

  • John Coleman(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It should serve a descriptive function of documenting actual behaviour. Unfortunately, gender norms have historically and sociologically been defined as the societal prescriptions of what the ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ are for each sex, equating ‘norms’ with external dictates. With this historical and sociological usage, ‘gender norms are the prescriptive guidelines that form the gender roles’ (Doyle 1985: 88). Gender stereotypes are oversimplified ‘socially shared beliefs that certain qualities can be assigned to individuals, based on their membership in the female or male half of the human race’ (Lips 1988: 2). Thus males share one cluster of traits, to include as examples aggression and objectivity, while females share another, to include emotionality and passivity, etc. Gender stereotypes are a rigid and simplified version of gender roles that provide little or no flexibility for individual difference. Gender identity 2 has been described in terms of process as well as product. The process refers to decision-making as to whether and to what degree these externally defined gender roles are appropriate to one’s self-definition (Archer 1985). One begins to formulate a gender identity in childhood. At that time the individual primarily accumulates, and clusters into schemas by ‘boy versus girl’, the messages provided by significant others in one’s society. The evaluative component of gender definition largely emerges during adolescence, and becomes increasingly refined throughout the adult years

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