Gender roles in marraige change with time
Women belong at home; they are in charge of cooking, cleaning and caring for the children. Men belong at work, earning the money and winning the bread.
Stereotypical gender roles such as these are defined by society and adopted by families. Although not everyone sticks to specific gender roles, they still play a part of human development and marriage.
However, do the roles people grow up learning change once they get married?
“I was taught that the husband should be the provider and protector. I’ve always accepted these roles and it makes me happy to be able to fulfill them,” said Dave Roth, a junior majoring in business.
After getting married this past June, Roth’s views of gender roles haven’t changed, but he found out his wife has different views of what his roles should be.
“I’ve had to re-learn my roles and incorporate her views,” he said.
Katie Smith, a senior majoring in speech communication, said she was never told her roles as a woman, but she learned from watching her parents.
“Which is funny, because Spencer [her husband] learned from his parents and we have different ideas of roles,” she said. “It has been fun putting our ideas together and establishing roles.”
She said one time, after she was engaged, an old man told her, “three meals a day for the rest of your life.”
“That ticked me off … I thought, yeah right,” Smith said. “I do enjoy cooking for my husband, but three meals a day for eternity is a bit extreme.”
After Smith was married in May, her views did not seem to change.
“I have learned that it’s OK to step out of my gender roles,” Smith said. “For the most part, my husband and I enjoy playing our specific gender roles and we pretty much stick to them, not because we feel we have to, but because we enjoy them.”
Janet Osborne, a professor of sociology, said she learned the roles of a woman by observing her mother.
“Many of them had traditional roles,” Osborne said. “The woman was in the home cooking, cleaning and ironing. The man was outside of the home.”
In Osborne’s household, both parents served in supporting roles for the family.
“The women in my family had to work in order to support the family, so I never felt like my role [as a wife] was only in the home,” Osborne said.
In 1962, when Osborne married, both her and her husband were in school. Her husband was in graduate school and many roles were shared, she said. They had no children for the first four or five years of their marriage, so both of them cooked and cleaned.
Once they had children, roles seemed to change.
“It has been sort of a process, taking into consideration what is going on … you can shift responsibilities,” Osborne said.
“Roles are different when you have children. You have to decide who does what and when, in order to be responsible for the children,” she said.
Now, Osborne and her husband do what has to be done without delineating who does what job.
“We do what needs to be done even if it means doing separate loads of our own laundry,” she said.
Deb Ascione, a professor of family and human development, spent her high school and college years in the ’60s where more traditional roles were expressed. However, the civil rights and the women’s movements made role changes more acceptable, Ascione said.
“My parents never sat me down to deliberately teach me my roles. I learned by watching older members of the family,” she said. “I watched their interaction. If it was successful, I patterned after their models.”
In the ’60s people began to think outside the box, Ascione said. By that time a more egalitarian system was accepted. An egalitarian role was more like equal roles of the husband and wife.
“[In an egalitarian role] it was acceptable for the man not to work 70 to 80 hour work weeks, and instead, spend time in the home raising the children,” Ascione said. “It was common for women to go outside the home and get a career or education.”
Ascione said she thinks of her roles as a growing and evolving experience. After she was married, she learned that her roles could change.
“Your roles as a newlywed are very different than your roles after being married for 15 years,” she said. “Newlyweds seem to always be trying to meet the other’s needs.
“After the children come along, parents have to re-negotiate their roles; who will stay home, who will be in charge of daily household jobs, etc,” Ascione said.
Ascione teaches a lower-division family and human development course.
Since the course is a lower-level class, most of Ascione’s students are 19-year-old freshmen and sophomores.
“A lot of my students come in with the idea that this is a class that will teach them how to have a perfect marriage. I have to remind them that this is a social science class that will teach them how to have good relationships and not necessarily teach them how to get married,” Ascione said.
Some students feel they will have very traditional roles where other students value the egalitarian role, Ascione said.
“It really doesn’t matter which way you prefer as long as the two people in the relationship agree on what they want,” she said. “It works as long as their expectations are compatible.”
-klm@cc.usu.edu