Since my last blog post, I have completely changed my project. I am now studying the gender norms different generations grew up with. I like to think that my generation has overcome sexist thinking and can feel comfortable defying traditional gender norms, though I know this isn't quite true. While I think that my generation is more open minded than previous generations, I believe we still internalize what it means to be a man or a women and what kind of roles we should fill. I have thus far interviewed one person from every generation 20 through 60 and I plan to interview more.
My project revolves around a couple concepts: family as a social institution and gender as a social institution. In the United States, there exists an ideal family. It is known as the nuclear family. As stated in Communicating Gender Diversity, “Despite the diversity of family forms, gender role expectations are delimited by the ideal of the traditional nuclear family (also called the family of procreation), which is composed of two parents (one male and one female) and biological children, with the male as the primary wage earner and the female as the primary homemaker” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, p. 155). Because of the nuclear family ideal, women were expected to be homemakers and those who took care of the children while the male worked outside of the home. I was curious to know if these ideals, while often impracticable affected the average person’s life as they grew up. Did their mother stay home or work? What about their father? Some of the people I interviewed also discussed the way their parents followed or resisted gender norms for various reasons. A 62 man from Omaha, Nebraska said in his interview, “In my family, both my father and mother worked. Many times my older sister, myself, and my sister who is one year younger than myself, would stay at home with the younger kids and babysit while my parents worked.”
Gender as a social institution is also intertwined with my project. According to sociologist Patricia Yancey Martin in Communicating Gender Diversity, there are twelve characteristics of social institutions. A couple of these pertain specifically to what I am studying: (1) constrain and facilitate behavior and (2) continually change. These characteristics stood out to me along with this quote from the book: “The workings of social ideology and institutions can be identified in people’s use of gender/sex to designate divisions of labor, organize public and private life, distribute resources, create status structures, and so forth” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, p. 145). Gender norms are enforced in our culture. It is frowned upon to disregard them. The characteristic of a social institution being ever changing made me wonder about the gender norms other generations grew up with. I questioned whether previous generations grew up with more sexist and strict gender norms and whether it affected their family in terms of which parent worked, did household chores, and did outdoor work. I interviewed people from my generation as a comparison to the older generations. A 21 year old girl from Columbus, Nebraska said in her interview, “My dad always was the one outside working and he was the rugged manly man and I think that’s what traditionally you would think. He was the one outside and he’d come inside after working on cars and be all dirty and my mom would be the one doing the laundry.”
References:
References:
DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating Gender Diversity: A Critical Approach. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc.
Video Interviews
