#Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It

[ciquery]

"Under domesticity, not only personality but also emotional expressiveness was gendered. "There is but little of genuine emotion in our [sex],"said an observer in 1839. Men were expected to be instrumental in their attitudes toward the world, to be doers. Self-control became closely identified with manhood. A working-class man told Lillian Rubin in the 1970s, "Guys talk about things and girls talk about feelings." "After a lifetime of repressing his feelings," Rubin notes, "he often is a blank, unaware that he’s thinking of or feeling anything." Though Rubin links this phenomenon to class, Deborah Tannen found that it continued to characterize conventional masculinity in the 1980s. Men, she found, often assume that the purpose of conversation is problem solving, an approach not shared by women. Our particular gender arrangements, which associate conventional masculinity with tight self-control and a narrow emotional range, make men from Mars and women from Venus."

Williams, Joan (2000). Is Domesticity Dead?. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (pp. 24). Oxford University Press.

#joan williams #feminism #reconstructive feminism #gender studies #domesticity #gender socialization #social justice #Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It #Deborah Tannen #Lillian Rubin

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Domesticity's organization of market and family work leaves women with two alternatives. They can perform as ideal workers without the flow of family work and other privileges male ideal workers enjoy. That is not equality. Or they can take the dead-end mummy track jobs or women's work. That is not equality either. A system that allows only these two alternatives is one that discriminates against women.

Williams, J. (2000) Unbending Gender. Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press

#quotes #gender equality

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"In the contemporary version of domesticity, choice rhetoric serves to effect the translation from status to affect by focusing attention away from three constraints that form the backbone of domesticity's organization of work. The first is employers' entitlement to demand an ideal worker with immunity from family work. The second constraint is the husbands' right, and their duty, to live up to this work ideal. The third involves the definition of the duties of a mother, as someone whose life should be framed around caregiving."

Williams, Joan (2000). Is Domesticity Dead?. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (pp. 20). Oxford University Press.

#joan williams #feminism #reconstructive feminism #gender studies #domesticity #gender socialization #social justice #Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It

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"Our economy is divided into mothers and others. Having children has a very strong negative effect on women's income, an effect that actually increased in the 1980s despite the fact that women have become better educated. The most dramatic figure [published in 1999] is that mothers who work full-time earn only sixty cents for every dollar earned by full-time fathers. Single mothers are most severely affected, earning the lowest percentage of men's average pay. Moreover, though the wage gap between men and women has fallen, the gap between the wages of mothers and others has widened in recent years. As a result, in an era when women's wages are catching up with men's, mothers lag behind. Given that nearly 90 percent of women become mothers during their working lives, this pattern is inconsistent with gender equality."

Williams, Joan (2000). Introduction. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (pp. 2). Oxford University Press.

#social justice #feminism #Joan Williams #Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It