gender: marriage/family

Nora H. sent in this excellent example of how advertisers gender chores. The ad goes through how generations and generations of women have done laundry.

For more examples, see these: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,.

See also our posts about how funny it is when men do housework: one, two, here, and three.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Larry Harnisch at the Daily Mirror dug up this gem, a 1909 story from the Los Angeles Times about prominent Chicago-area women’s rights advocates pushing back the time they served Thanksgiving dinner in order to go see the British suffragist Emiline Pankhurst:

“…one of the women voiced the sentiment that ‘every suffragist is a militant suffragist at heart’.” Well, obviously, if you’re willing to postpone Thanksgiving dinner, no matter what this woman says:

Those British suffragists must have been something if stoning legislators was part of the discussion.

Frank D. and Sara E. sent in these two examples, respectively, of humor that points to women’s disproportionate responsibility for housework and childcare.

Washing instructions:

Diaper changing wheel with “Mom” in many more slots than “Dad” or “Nanny” (Nanny?  I know, that’s a whole other post):

Both of these point to the fact that WE KNOW that women do this work disproportionately, even as most women work as many paid hours as their husbands.  These are inside jokes for everyone in America.  But this disproportionality is perhaps the number one cause of women’s continued economic disadvantage (compared to men).  Motherhood, as Ann Crittenden explains, is the greatest predictor of poverty in old age.

I suppose we still think it’s funny–and not very, very serious–because most women in the U.S. don’t have much hope of escaping these responsibilities.  It’s easy to make personal sacrifices to fight patriarchy (like not wearing make-up), but once kids and a home are involved, you’re not making personal sacrifices; refusing to do more than your share of childcare (and the housework that comes with it) means that your child is sacrificing too.  And that is too big of a sacrifice for most women to make.

So, I guess sometimes humor is all we ladies have got.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Shirley A. sent in a Zellers sale flyer that is really interesting in light of the recent post we did on a Best Buy promotion. Whereas the Best Buy promotion was aimed directly at men, you’ll see that this flyer, for a store that sells household items instead of fancy gadgets, is aimed staunchly at women… who have to buy for their whole family and their home as well as themselves.

For more on gender and responsibility for the home:

First, check out this longitudinal data on how much housework wives and husbands do.

Then, for more examples of how women are responsible for the home, see this KFC advertisement offering moms a night off, this a commercial montage, Italian dye ad with a twist, women love to clean, homes of the future, what’s for dinner, honey?, liberation through quick meals, and my husband’s an ass.

See also these humorous illustrations: I love it when you talk clean to me, men do housework fantasy calendar, the househusbands of Hollywood, and porn for new moms.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I was at the Pittsburgh airport last week and I saw this concourse map and I thought to myself, “Wow, they used pink and they’re not trying to signify WOMAN!  That’s something else!”

Then I looked closer and noticed that this concourse map was specifically for the shopping in the concourse.  Notice it’s a map of the “AirMall”:

Sigh.

Rebecca H. sent us a link to the Clorox website and I thought “Holy Moly! There is actually a MAN on a cleaning product website!” (in the lower right):

Then I looked closer and realized that the man in question is a gay man famous for being on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Sigh.

Two opportunities for suffocating stereotypes to be undermined; two opportunities lost.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Mary M. of Cooking with the Junior League sent me a link to amalah.com, where you will find images from a 1962 textbook titled When You Marry (you can find the full text of the 1953 edition without photos here, and Larry found a full pdf of the 1962 edition here):

The book covers many aspects of dating and marriage and provides some fascinating insights into gender roles and social assumptions of the time. Here are some useful facts about social classes and families that you might like to know:

Working class people go to work sooner? Wow. Weird. But at least they have fewer troubles than the middle class. There are so many irritations you have to face when you aren’t poor, but at least you “weather” them well.

I may use this as an example of pointless graphs:

Here we have a list of some factors that are favorable, unfavorable, or unimportant for marital success; I’ve circled some of the more noteworthy items in red:

Text I highlighted:

[favorable]

Happiness of parents’ marriage —both (Not true for Negro couples)

[unfavorable]

Combinations where man feels inferior and woman does not

Prone to argue points–wife

Determination to get own way–wife

Wife’s cultural background higher than husband’s

Residence in the city during childhood

So you’re sure to have marital problems if the wife won’t give in on things and instead keeps being all argumentative and wanting her own way. I’m not sure what defines a cultural background as “higher” than others, but we see here the same pattern as we do with social class (which I presume is related to cultural background): it’s ok for men to “marry down,” but women aren’t supposed to.

The textbook provides a pretty grim depiction of sex for a newly-married couple:

I found this little gem in on a page from the section on how ideals of marital life often don’t fit with reality:

It’s so widespread to think of marketing and advertising as manipulative today (even among those who like at least some ads or don’t see a real problem with them) that it’s striking to see such a sincerely  positive portrayal of it as a helpful, even “kind” industry.

It is noteworthy that the textbook, used during the height of the “Leave it to Beaver” “traditional” family era, depicts the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker family form as a recent creation, as wives became “expensive luxuries”:

This section describing which women should work doesn’t seem to speak highly of women overall, since just a “few” of us have “special talents and skills.” However, it does make the point (in #5) that “a woman is not unemployed because she is not paid for her work,” an effort to bring attention to the value of women’s unpaid labor (in this instance, community/volunteer work):

And then there is a helpful discussion of eugenics and good breeding :

There’s a lot to ponder there. I think it’s fascinating the way that it illustrates some of our stereotypes about the 1950s/60s (women are supposed to be mothers, sex outside of marriage is bad, etc.) but contradicts others (the male-breadwinner family isn’t a long-standing “traditional” family but rather one they can clearly trace to the recent past, and which even then seemed like it might not last).

UDPATE: Larry looked through the pdf version of the whole book and found this nice cartoon:

This last week New York Times suggesting that older woman/younger man relationships were on the rise.  But I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.  The data below shows that the percentage of men marrying women ten and especially five years younger is decreasing and the percentage of women marrying men ten and especially five years younger is increasing.

It all looks very dramatic until you check out the y axis.  Notice that the y axis for the “husband older” graph is zero to 35%, but the y axis for the “wife older” graph is zero to 10%.  This makes the data for men look more impressive than it is.  Not that 8 or 10 percentage points is insignificant, but it would be far less impressive on a zero to 100 scale.  The data for the women, especially sitting right next to the “husband older” table, look far more impressive than it is.

Only about 6% of women are marrying men five years younger or more.  That’s a two percentage point increase since 1960.  Not exactly a cougar revolution.  One in four men are still marrying women five years younger or more.  And, though it appears that they’re not marrying women five years younger or more as frequently, the age distribution of the remaining 69% of marriages is left invisible and most of them probably involve women that are somewhat younger than their husbands.

So, yes, today women are more likely to marry younger men than they were in 1960.  But the presentation of the data (the inconsistency in the y axis) makes the degree of difference seem larger than it is.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lindsay H. sent in a Kingsford Charcoal ad, in which we learn the proper cooking roles for men and women–men cook outside, women cook inside:

It’s just like how men are supposed to do their cleaning outside by mowing the lawn! Glad we cleared all that up, and also instructed women how to avoid embarrassing their male partners in front of their guy friends.