marriage/family

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.

Farrah F. sent us a link to an article on the website for Forward, a newspaper aimed at the American Jewish community. The article looks at the gender gap in pay at Jewish community organizations. According to the article,

…a Forward survey of 75 major American Jewish communal organizations found that fewer than one in six are run by women, and those women are paid 61 cents to every dollar earned by male leaders.

Incomes of leaders of the organizations they surveyed (data is from 2008 unless otherwise specified, and women are highlighted in blue):

The Forward’s survey was drawn from the most recent public records or, if that information wasn’t available, from the organization itself. The median salary for men was $287,702, while the median for women was $175,211, amounting to a ratio of 61 cents to one dollar.

More from the article:

Women comprise about 75% of those employed by federations, advocacy and social service organizations, and religious and educational institutions, but occupy only 14.3% of the top positions. Of the 11 female leaders identified in this survey, three are in interim roles.

In another article, Forward discusses family leave policies at Jewish organizations, finding that relatively few offer paid leave:

UPDATE: A few people have asked why I chose to post about these particular organizations. The short answer is: because that’s what I had. My interest here wasn’t in the religious aspect, but in the gender disparities in volunteer/community organizations; I suspect these same trends occur in a lot of similar organizations, not just Jewish ones. I wish I had info on a more general set, but I so far haven’t been able to find a study like this one, but for a wider array of organizations. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to post it.

John L. sent in a link to a visual illustrating support for gay marriage by state and age:

The data supports the notion that younger people are more supportive of gay marriage than older people. I also think it’s interesting that, even in states that we normally consider quite hostile to gay rights (the ones at the bottom of the table), there is still a significant age difference:  18-29 year-olds in Alabama, for example, are more supportive of gay marriage than people 65 and older in Massachusetts.  So, while we like to think about states as “liberal” or “conservative,” spreading out the data by age tells a much more complicated story.

For more data on support for gay rights, see here and here.

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

Kathleen K. was recently looking at the Credit Education Week Canada website, where they have a number of quizzes for couples to take. At the end of each quiz there is a picture of a couple along with your results. She was pleasantly surprised that this image accompanied the results of one quiz:

It’s a rare example of the normalization of gay/lesbian couples in media not specifically targeted at the GLBT community. The couple is presented as a legitimate image of love for both straight and gay couples, and there is no ambiguity about whether or not they’re a couple. Given the general invisibility of gay and lesbian couples in media outlets, and the use of only heterosexual couples as “neutral,” unmarked examples, it’s quite striking to see this.

Also see our post on a commercial by an Argentinian bank that depicted transgendered individuals positively.

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:

In the U.S., when people refer to the “traditional family,” they usually mean a family that they associate with the 1950s.  But the 1950s was a really unusual time in American history.  Elsewhere I’ve written about how the husband breadwinner/wife homemaker model is an American anomaly.  The data below, put together by the New York Times, shows that the 1950s was an unusual time in terms of age of marriage also:

Though the data is rough (five points across 107 years), you can see a distinct dip in the age of marriage that includes the ’50s.

So history isn’t, as we often suppose, a straight line from one point to another.  It’s a complicated story.  And the 1950s… well, to choose that era as “traditional” is no more reasonable than to choose today or the enlightenment or the dark ages or…

Also see: everyone needs a wife and what does “traditional marriage” look like?

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