Gender Equality

Talking about Yahoo Answers in class the other day inspired me to check out some of the questions on the Womens Studies page. I was reading and answering questions when I came this one : what happened to the traditional gender roles. Because I've always wanted to be a housewife, you know taking all day to get ready for my husband to come home, slaving over a really nice dinner, cleaning everything, I thought I should check it out. I didn't bother to answer because I found one answer that I was more focused on. Jas B said:
Traditional gender roles treated women as second class citizens.

You can call it traditional gender roles but the reality was that this was the oppression of women.

As another person has said women realized during the second world war when the men were away fighting and they had to work in the factories, as engineers and mechanics and all the other jobs which had been traditionally men's work that they were just as capable and they liked the independence it gave them to earn their own money.

Then after the war when women were told to go back into the homes, they decided there was more to life than babies, dishes and happy husbands. They felt that their contribution to the war effort had been forgotten and realized how constricting their lives were.

Women got sick of being treated as second class citizens and demanded changes in society and to all the laws which did not treat them as equal to men.

God had nothing to do with it. it's about equality.

The last part relates to a on going conversation between the other people. Anyways, this made this about a book I got from my grandma. It's Emily Post's Pocket Book of Etiquette. It was published in 1965. I find it absolutely hilarious to read. The majority of the book it dated, but the information is helpful. Part Fourteen is the last part in the book, but the first part I read. Page 462: A Happy Marriage. The last two sentences of the third paragraph of The Wife's Part is my absolute favorite line, just because it's so bad. ' And the wife who sees her husband off to work in a dirty bathrobe, with hair uncombed and face unwashed, send him off with a thoroughly unflattering picture of her in his mind. He may find his neat, efficient, pretty secretary more appealing than his unkempt, uncaring wife!' What a horrible thing to write! If your ugly, expect your husband to be cheating on you with his secretary. Ugh.

I went on to read The Husband's Part and one paragraph stood out to me. ' The husband that keeps his wife company in the kitchen while she is finishing the dinner preparations and gives a helping hand with the dishes after dinner, rather than retiring to the TV set or his newspaper, will find himself more repaid by his appreciative wife.' This is like what we talked about in class. Are we (women) supposed to sleep with a guy because he buys us dinner? So, are we supposed to 'pay' our husbands for actually helping us out in the kitchen?  I thought a relationship was a partnership, a team, not I'll help with the dishes only because you'll have sex with me for. I think if I ever had a guy say that to me, I'd drop the dish rag then and there and those dishes would never get done.

After reading certain parts of this book, it made me realize this all has come a long way. There's more to life than having babies, keeping husbands happy and doing dishes.