The world was a very different place sixty years ago. The men came home from the war to take back the work force from the women and sent the women back into the home to follow traditional domestic roles. All aspects of life had to be cookie cutter perfect, to include the gender roles. The roles of both genders have been portrayed by the BBC Television show, Call the Midwife, as they use to be in the 1950’s. The men were the breadwinners of their family by working arduous hours, protect their family and home, and have zero contact with feminine things and activities; the women were expected to get married early, always look their best, and never indulge in their aspirations for a career outside of the home unless they were single.
The war engrained men to be the defenders of their nation. As they came home, that role spilled into their everyday lives. Men became the protectors of their home and family by working hard to put food on the table and a roof over their family’s heads. Men were criticized and their masculinity questioned by
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Most of the jobs that women held were the same type of jobs that they would be doing as a housewife such as a nanny, teacher, or cook. Unfortunately for them, once they became married, they were expected to quit their jobs to become the dutiful housewife for their husbands as Chummy did in Episode 1, Series 3 of Call the midwife (Episode 1, Series 3). Their life would revolve around her husband and the home because the role of the female is domesticity, but many struggled with having to give up their career. They did not want to be defined as just a mother or wife. Due to lack of birth control, having kids was an inevitable part of married life, as seen in Episode 5 of Series 2 (Episode 5, Series 2). Creating and nurturing children was looked at as the most important thing about being a woman. Abortion was still an abomination to the female
“Feminism is both an intellectual commitment and a political movement that seeks justice for women and the end of sexism in all forms” (Baptiste). Just as in the past, feminism continues to act as a controversial issue among men and women. In the 1960’s, women finally addressed workplace inequity and created woman organizations to achieve equality. In the early 1960’s, the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act set a milestone for women’s progression towards work equality. Though women have made great leaps towards true equality, women still face many challenges and continue to be categorized as the subservient gender.
Like stated earlier, gender roles in the 50’s were very strict and narrow-minded. That being said, women were extremely limited in their role in society. First of all, women were expected to be homemakers. By homemaker, I mean the women w...
In the early 1900’s, women who were married main jobs were to care for her family, manage their houses, and do housework. That is where the word housewife was come from. During the 1940's, women's roles and expectations in society were changing quickly and a lot. Before, women had very limited say in society. Since unemployment was so high during the Great Depression, most people were against women working because they saw it as women taking jobs from men that needed to work. Women were often stereotyped to stay home, have babies, and to be a good wife and mother. Advertisements often targeted women, showing them in the kitchen, talking with children, serving dinner, cleaning, and them with the joy of a clean house or the latest kitchen appliance.
Unfortunately during the thirties women did not have these choices. According to Mary Kinnear in her book Daughter of Time, “In the United States the proportion of women workers engaged in professional work increased only from 11.9 percent to 14.2 percent between 1920 and 1940.” During this time, the role of housewives meant that they were responsible for most of the household duties and taking care of the children. Ann Oakley said in her book Woman’s Work, “In the social image of a woman, the roles of wife and mother are not distinct from the role of housewife.”
During WWII, women took over the work force, and had such inspirations as Rosie the Riveter. This created a generation of women who wanted more out of life than birthing children, and keeping a nice home for their husband. The end of the war, however, brought with it a decrease of working women. In the 1950’s the rate of working women had slightly rebounded to 29% following the post-war decrease in 1945. These women were well rounded, working outside the home, and still having dinner on the table by 5PM.
“Gender” refers to the cultural construction of whether one is female, male, or something else (Kottak 2013: 209). Typically, based on your gender, you are culturally required to follow a particular gender norm, or gender role. Gender roles are the tasks and activities a culture assigns to the sexes (Kottak 213: 209). The tasks and activities assigned are based upon strongly, seized concepts about male and female characteristics, or gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes…are oversimplified but strongly upheld ideas about bout the characteristics of males and females (Kottak 2013: 209).
The social perception of women has drastically changed since the 1950’s. The social role of women during the 1950’s was restrictive and repressed in many ways. Society during that time placed high importance on expectations of behavior in the way women conducted themselves in home life as well as in public. At home the wife was tasked with the role of being an obedient wife, caring mother, and homemaker. Women publicly were expected to form groups and bond over tea with a slice of cake. All the while government was pushing this idealize roll for women in a society “dominated” by men. However, during this time a percentage of women were finding their way into the work force of men. “Women were searching their places in a society led by men;
War has been a mainstay of human civilization since its inception thousands of years ago, and throughout this long and colorful history, warriors have almost exclusively been male. By repeatedly taking on the fundamentally aggressive and violent role of soldier, Man has slowly come to define Himself through these violent experiences. Although modern American society regulates the experiences associated with engaging in warfare to a select group of individuals, leaving the majority of the American public emotionally and personally distant from war, mainstream American masculinity still draws heavily upon the characteristically male experience of going to war. In modern American society, masculinity is still defined and expressed through analogy with the behavior and experiences of men at war; however, such a simplistic masculinity cannot account for the depth of human experience embraced by a modern man.
In every war the women had stepped up to try to help the men who were off to fight, but the more agrarian societies of the revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and even World War I meant that most stepped up to do the work on the farm. In World War II, it was just as likely that the wives and mothers were stepping up to take a place in a factory as in the fields. While America was still primarily agrarian, the factories needed for warfare had brought the women to take their husband’s and son’s and boyfriend’s places. And while some women followed their husbands to the battlefront in the Civil War, and a few even enlisted as men, World War II brought a whole new experience as a huge war machine needed the men at the fronts for ...
Before I watched 'A Midwife's Tale', a movie created from the diary found by Laurel Ulrich chronicling the life of a woman named Martha Ballard, I thought the women in these times were just housewives and nothing else. I pictured them doing the cleaning and the cooking for their husbands and not being very smart because of the lack of education or them being unable to work. My view on the subject changed however when I watched this specific woman's life and her work.
...nd bloodshed. Women gave a reason to go to war, a reason to come back from the war, and oddly, a reason to want to return to the war. The men were in a fraternity of life, and with no women around for so long they began to rely on themselves, and no longer had the needs that were provided them by women. They wanted to play in the jungle with their friends, only this time with no guns. They missed the life that they spent together eating rations and swapping stories. When they went home they were veterans, like the old men of the World Wars. If they stayed, they were still heroes, warriors, and victims. They still loved deeply the women at home, because they had no reason to fight or bicker, or possibly realize that the women they assumed would be waiting for them had changed in that time. The men were torn between love of women, and the love of brotherhood.
...though people believe that, those on the home front have it just as a bad as the soldiers, because they have to deal with the responsibilities of their husbands, there is nothing that can compare to what these men have gone through. The war itself consumed them of their ideology of a happy life, and while some might have entered the war with the hope that they would soon return home, most men came to grips with the fact that they might never make it out alive. The biggest tragedy that follows the war is not the number of deaths and the damages done, it is the broken mindset derives from being at war. These men are all prime examples of the hardships of being out at war and the consequences, ideologies, and lifestyles that develop from it.
Due to the idealization of domesticity in media, there was a significantly stagnant period of time for women’s rights between 1945 and 1959. Women took over the roles for men in the workplace who were fighting abroad during the early 1940s, and a strong, feminist movement rose in the 1960s. However, in between these time periods, there was a time in which women returned to the home, focusing their attention to taking care of the children and waiting on their husband’s every need. This was perpetuated due to the increasing popularity of media’s involvement in the lives of housewives, such as the increasing sales of televisions and the increase in the number of sexist toys.
In the 1960’s women were still seen as trophies and were beginning to be accepted into the work industry. They were still homemakers, raised the family, and made sure their husbands were happy. That was the social norms for women during that time period. They were not held to high work expectations like men were. But something amazing happened that would change women 's lives for centuries; it was the 1970’s. The 60’s put the equality movement in motion but 70’s was a time of reform where women were finally able to control their own paths. Not only was the 70’s a historical marker for the fiftieth anniversary for women suffrage, it was also a marker for the drastic change of different social norms, the changes of the American Dream, and the
These homemaking shows’ tactics were to encourage and show women that being a homemaker, wife, and mother is not a lonely life or a life full of drudgery and that having this status is not being an unproductive citizen. These shows had to incorporate these tactics because a decade before women’s role were vastly different to the roles they have now. Women before were working in jobs that were mainly solely for men, they were independent by earning their own wages, and being patriotic citizens by participating in the war effort by fighting on the home front or joining the military. Their work on both fronts were dangerous and life-threatening in which these jobs were predominantly for men; many were spies, others made bombs and weapons, and many flew planes and carried out dangerous missions. All of this changed during the postwar years in which their main occupations now were mothers and housewives. It may seem that women decreasing independence and their rigid gender and social mobility made them feel limited in