Introduction
To have a family is important because at most instances it brings about a sense of belongingness. The family provides love and affection to an individual whether they are an adult or a child, a man or a woman. Through the family a person can have love and affection he/she needs to be a good member of society. The family also provides physical needs of an individual. The family is a basic unit of society. It is where values are formed and improved. The family helps in molding someone to be a good member of society. The family can initiate change the society. Since it is a basic unit of society, it can gradually initiate change from within and spread it to other members of the society. When a society has a culture of corruption, the family can change it by teaching younger members to be honest and never steal things. The family has acquired various kinds of changes over the years. Its composition and principles have adjusted to the changing environment. The roles of family members have also changed depending on how they intend to survive in their environment. This paper intends to concentrate on changing gender roles in the family.
Sociology of the family
A family can either be extended, symmetrical, or nuclear. A family that is extended usually has members that are a relative of one of the parents. A family that is symmetrical has a father and mother that shares tasks and decisions equally. This is a movement away from the traditional practice where only a father or mother is the one that makes decisions. A nuclear family can be considered as a traditional family where the members include the father, the mother and their offspring. The processes in the family can differ due to the culture, tradition and values they have. The stages in the family life include Independence, Coupling or marriage, Parenting, Launching adult children and Retirement or senior years. The stages in family life involve a never ending cycle. Different approaches have been used towards the family. One approach is functionalist. In this approach the family is analyzed through its structure and practices. In this approach the family is seen as something that is made of inter-dependent parts that try to work together so that they can fulfill the things needed so that they can survive society. Another approach is feminist wherein the focus is on gender politics, sexuality and power relations. This approach wants to understand the nature of inequality in the family.
Choice of theme
The theme changing gender roles within the family was chosen as a firm because such theme describes the situation of the family nowadays. It helps in giving an account of how the family has changed. The theme of changing gender roles in the family can help in determining how some members of the family have been stereotyped before and how they are being described now. The theme also helps in understanding what might be the future scenario in a family and the future of gender roles. Comparisons will be made on the gender roles before and current gender roles. Through comparisons the paper will try to identify the obvious changes that have been made.
Discussion and analysis
Gender roles
The impact of sex-differentiated social roles on behavior is mediated by a variety of psychological and social processes. One set of processes concerns the formation of gender roles and their impact on behavior in social interaction. Another set of processes refers to the acquisition of different skills and beliefs by men and women, mainly through their participation in relatively sex-segregated social roles across their life spans. There are variations within and between the sexes and within and between cultures in mating choices, aggressiveness, sexual restrictiveness, and parenting behaviors. However, powerful evolutionary pressures tend to pull human males and females in different directions regardless of societal particulars (Eckes & Trautner 2000). An evolutionary account of gender roles does not deny socialization or cognitive influences on human behavior, but it does assume that human thought and human learning unfold within a wider biological context. The evolutionary history of the human species is such that ancestral males and females reliably faced different survival and reproductive tasks. As a consequence of those recurring differences in ecological pressure over eons, man’s ancestors passed on a slightly different array of psychological mechanisms to modern males and females (Eckes & Trautner 2000).
For many years concern with sex-role development was centered upon the parenting process and rooted in Freud's description of the family in which the mother rightly provided feminine virtues of love and nurturance and the father the masculine strengths of rules and discipline. Freud's view of sex role development plays out as a function of the biological sex of the child rather than socialization differences. His description of children's adoption of the roles appropriate for their sex through identification with the same-sex parent and the resolution of the Oedipus and Electra complexes has permeated a person’s thinking to an extent far greater than the amount of support for his theory, which was derived primarily from the memories of adults rather than the observation of children (Moser 1993). However, psychoanalytic theory focused on early childhood as a critically important period and, more than any other, recognized children's enormous emotional investment in their identities and roles as boys or girls. Although social role theory treats the differing assignments of women and men into social roles as the basic underlying cause of sex-differentiated social behavior, the impact of roles on behavior is mediated by psychological and social processes. Important among these processes is the formation of gender roles by which each sex is expected to have characteristics that equip it for its sex-typical roles (Payne 2001). Almost all societies have a gender system that affects a person's role. The concept and ideas of this system vary depending on culture, tradition and environment. Gender roles are most commonly known as stereotypes to men and women. It is said to be a form of division of labor by gender. The stereotype to men is they work, fix their cars and provide for the family. For the women their stereotypical role is to cook, clean and perform maternal duties. The gender roles have changed over the years and mixtures of roles have been found in both male and female.
Changing gender roles and the family
Gender roles are the shared expectations that apply to individuals on the basis of their socially identified sex. Gender roles are emergent from the activities carried out by individuals of each sex in their sex-typical occupational and family roles; the characteristics required by these activities become stereotypic of women or men. To the extent that women more than men occupy roles that require predominantly communal behaviors, domestic behaviors, or subordinate behaviors for successful role performance, such tendencies become stereotypic of women and are incorporated into a female gender role. To the extent that men more than women occupy roles that require predominantly agentic behaviors, resource acquisition behaviors, or dominant behaviors for successful role performance, such tendencies become stereotypic of men and are incorporated into a male gender role (Dreman 1997). These gender roles, which are an important focus of socialization, begin to be acquired early in childhood and are elaborated throughout childhood and adolescence. Gender roles facilitate the activities typically carried out by adults of each sex. For example, the expectation that women be other-oriented and compassionate facilitates their nurturing activities within the family as well as their work in many female-dominated occupations (Momsen 2004).
The expectancies associated with gender roles act as normative pressures that foster behaviors consistent with sex-typical work roles through expectancy confirmation processes and self-regulatory processes. Gender roles can thereby induce sex differences in behavior in the absence of any intrinsic, inborn psychological differences between women and men. In contrast to specific roles based on occupations, family relationships, and membership in other groups such as volunteer organizations, gender roles are diffused because they apply to people who have membership in the extremely general social categories of men and women (Walsh 2003). Gender roles thus pertain to virtually everyone. These roles, like other diffuse roles based on demographic characteristics such as age, race, and social class, have great scope or generality because they are applicable to all portions of one's daily life. In contrast, more specific roles based on factors such as family relationships and occupations are mainly relevant to behavior in a particular group or organizational context. In viewing recent structural changes in the family as part of a historical continuum, the changing status of women emerges as the major ongoing dynamic from the end of the Victorian era to the present (Duck & Milardo 2000). Although families had many more children in the past, women invested relatively less parenting time, contributing to the shared family economy in varied ways, from weaving to bookkeeping. Fathers, older children, extended kin, and neighbors all participated actively in child rearing. The integration of family and work life allowed for intensive sharing of labor between husbands and wives, and parents and children. Industrialization and urbanization brought a redefinition of gender roles and functions. Family work and productive paid work became segregated into separate gendered spheres of home and workplace. Domesticity became glorified, assigning to women exclusively the roles of custodian of the hearth, nurturer of the young, and caretaker of the old. The nuclear family structure provided for a healthy complementarity in the division of roles into male instrumental leadership and female socio emotional support. The fields of psychiatry and child development adhered to this family model and its corollary that the failure of a family to uphold proper gender roles would invariably damage children. More recent men's movements have sought greater involvement in parenting by fathers and a reconnection with the fathers they barely knew. Although some advocate a return to the traditional patriarchal model, most men share with women the desire for a full and equal partnership in family life. Living out this aim is still a work in progress (Lippa 2002). Traditionally only gender roles based on femininity and masculinity existed; however, as time goes by different acceptable male or female gender roles have emerged. An individual can have diverse gender roles through identifying themselves with a subculture. The traditional gender roles of women have become less relevant in most societies since the period of industrialization started. Women are now taking roles that were traditionally reserved for men, most of the time it causes pressure on many men to be more masculine and more responsive to changes. Gender roles have changed over the years. Men now can clean, do the dishes or stay home and take care of the kids. Women can now have a successful working career, and do things that originally are for men. If feminism approach will be used on the current family situation; it can be said that the structure of the family based on gender roles have shifted from being male centered into one that focuses on equal sharing of decisions, ideals and responsibilities.
Conclusion and Evaluation
The family has acquired various kinds of changes over the years. Its composition and principles have adjusted to the changing environment. The roles of family members have also changed. Each member of a family was restricted by the sex roles of the traditional family, these roles such as the father as the worker and the mother as the homemaker are declining, the mother is becoming the supplementary provider and she retains the responsibilities of child rearing. Gender roles are most commonly known as stereotypes to men and women. It is said to be a form of division of labor by gender. The stereotype to men is they work, fix their cars and provide for the family. For the women their stereotypical role is to cook, clean and perform maternal duties. Gender roles have changed over the years. Men now can clean, do the dishes or stay home and take care of the kids. Women can now have a successful working career, and do things that originally are for men. Before only men can vote, now everyone under the legal age can vote. Before leadership in the household belongs to the husband, now women can be a leader of the family especially during times where the husband cannot perform his duties. The changes to the gender roles can be attributed to feminism and its widening reach. Feminism started the call for fair treatment of women, and the proper handling and implementation of their rights. Feminism also made sure that women are treated with respect and dignity. There are still countries that refuse to accept the change in gender roles, this countries culture and tradition makes them distant to the concept of changing gender roles. The future is bright for more changes in gender roles and family’s role to society.
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