Paper Topic:

Working Women in American Society

Domesticity is a gender system ' that delineates organization of market work and family work and the gender norms that justify sustain , and reproduce that organization . This is how Joan Williams defined domesticity in her book entitled Unbending Gender : Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It . Domesticity arose in the nineteenth century and it still remains entrenched in many forms in American Society today . This way of life separated market work and family work in both space and time . It sets up a system that market work is the

realm of men while women are delegated to the sphere of home making ' and parenting

As a gender system , domesticity has two defining characteristics Williams wrote . The first is that organization of market work around the ideal of a worker who works full time and overtime and takes little or no time off for childbearing or child rearing . The ideal workers in this system are those that can work full time , or in most cases with plenty of overtime . Caregivers ' or those assigned to the childbearing and rearing (women ) cannot , therefore , perform as ideal workers given this structure . Thus the second defining characteristic of this system is providing for caregiving by marginalizing caregivers , cutting them off from most of the social roles that offer responsibility and authority (Williams , 1

This system of structuring market work and family work sustains the ideology of the defined roles of men and women . Men , who are supposedly aggressive and highly motivated , naturally ' belong to the market work . Women characterized as weak and soft belong to the home . Men provide for the needs of the family , taking very little time to participate in child rearing , leaving this mostly to women . This structure perpetuates the gender norms that define the role and performance of men as breadwinner , and women as homemakers

Before the nineteenth century market work and family work is the not isolated from each other . The rise of industries , businesses , and professionals , however , also created a new definition of the American middle class . It also brought forth new ideology about the home that arose from the new attitudes toward work and family . In article The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood the new middle class family is said to be different from the preindustrial family that may partly be the roots of this new ideology . These are

A nineteenth-century middle-class family did not have to make what it needed in to survive . Men could work in jobs that produced goods or services while their wives and children stayed at home

When husbands went off to work , they helped create the view that men alone should support the family . Men belong in the public sphere or the world of work , and a woman 's place is the private sphere or home

The middle-class family came to look at itself and at the nuclear family in general , as the backbone of society (From The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood

The emergence of...

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