Domestic Gender Roles

Paper Summary:

The paper examines the social and cultural factors which have been employed to detain women from achieving equality with men. The paper focuses on American society in the late 19th century through the 20th century and reveals that consumer culture was used in co-conspiracy with the retention of institutional patriarchy in order to restrain female ambition within the boundaries of sexual idealization, beauty and domesticity. The paper concludes that although progress has been made, we are still far from real equality.

From the Paper:

"The end of the 19th Century brought with it a host of changes which, as driven by technology and spreading urbanization, brought the entire world under the sway of the Industrial Revolution. Factories, tenements and immigrants filled the cities of Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, and with them came overcrowding, urban blight, aesthetic conformity and the seedling of mass consumerism. The result was not a move away from the inequality of the eras before it but a repackaging of this imbalance to fit new cultural tendencies. This would be especially true for women in such contexts as the United States, where the premise of equality would be subverted by a reconsideration of American culture within the context of consumerist roles. Indeed, even as the Industrial Revolution and the decades of economic development to follow would present new cultural and social opportunities for women as well as men, the Golden Age of American consumer development would reintroduce the domestic imbalance of the Victorian Era."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Breines, W. (2001). Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. University of Chicago Press.
• Odem, M.E. (1995). Delinquent Daughter: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female. The University of North Carolina Press.
• Schrum, K. (2004). Some Wore Bobby Sox: the Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1945. Palgrave. Macmillan.

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