The role of women has changed dramatically throughout the centuries. The early years for women were always harsh and demanding, but as time went on and feminism spread, the role of women and family became more dominant.
The male Christian clergy portrayed women in the Middle Ages having two options: subjugated housewife or confined nun. Fortunately, most medieval women avoided both fates. The vast majority of them, in fact, worked in a range of trades, though they were concentrated in the food and clothing industries. Nuns avoided the problems associated with pregnancy, and could attain some power. Aristocratic women could manage large households. Most historians have probably misunderstood the lives of children in the Middle Ages. Children had a 30-50% chance of dying before they turned five, so some historians have suggested that parents would not risk making a big emotional investment in young children; some children were even killed deliberately.
Children worked as soon as they were able, and are depicted in medieval art as “little adults,” so some historians have wondered whether people in the Middle Ages had an understanding of childhood as a distinct phase of life, with its own needs. But medieval medical and clerical authorities did, in fact, write about childhood as a special stage in life, and there is also evidence that parents and society at large cherished their babies and children. One of the first women to step up to men was Joan of Arc. She convinced the kind to give her command of his army in order to reverse French fortunes. Although she led the French to great victory, the men executed her as a heretic on May 30, 1431.
The Essay on Abortion Women Child Life
In 1973 the Abortion In 1973 the Supreme Court decision known as Roe vs. Wade, made it possible for women to have safe and legal abortions by well-trained professionals. This decision not only gave a woman the right to choose, but it drastically decreased pregnancy-related injury and death. Now the policy proposal has been done to close up abortion clinics, thus making it virtually impossible for ...
Marriage occurred at a later age (mid- to late-twenties for men, early to mid-twenties for women) in the 16th-18th centuries than it had previously in Europe and England. One reason for this shift was that, in a time of population growth, it took couples longer to accumulate the capital needed to raise a family. Parents were generally involved in arranging their children’s marriages, though the couple’s own wishes also carried significant weight. Generally, two to four children survived to adulthood in the European nuclear family. Birth control was not very effective; wet-nursing was controversial. Though they sometimes exhibited it in ways that may seem strange to us, early modern parents almost certainly loved their children, and probably also each other.
European universities had offered little room for scholarship by women; the institutions of science soon turned out to be even more exclusionary. Not only were women prevented from becoming members of scientific societies and discouraged from practicing science on their own, but also women became objects of study and description – under the assumption that they were inferior beings! Two categories of women were occasionally able to work around these constraints, noblewomen and female artisans. Women did write important scientific works and popularizations. One of the first women to become educated in the time of Humanism was Christine De’ Pisan. She wrote the “City of Ladies” which is about the accomplishment of great women of history. She is recognized today as being one of the first feminists. Maragaret Cavendish was the wife of a philosophe and wrote many important works including the “Observations upon Experimental Philosophy” (1666) and the “Grounds of Natural Philosophy” (1668).
She was the only woman allowed to visit a meeting of the Royal Society of London. Maria Cunitz published a book on astronomy as well as her husband, Gottfried Kirch. She discovered a comet in 1702 and died in 1720.
The “family economy,” in which the household was the basic unit of production and consumption, was the norm throughout Europe before the Industrial Revolution. In northwestern Europe, the “household” was generally a nuclear family and its servants: a married couple, their pre-adult children, and their servants, making a total of six people or fewer. Premarital sex was common, and people married in their twenties, usually after spending several years earning wages, room, and board as a household servant. Eastern European “households” were larger, with more than nine members of three or more generations living together. Couples married before the age of twenty. Landowners in Eastern Europe generally discouraged families from separating into multiple households. Everyone who could, worked, with the goal of supporting the family unit. The death of the father could easily spell disaster for the family, especially in Western Europe. Women’s economic contributions to the household were considered more important than their biological reproductive capacities. Women and babies experienced high mortality rates during and after childbirth; and many infants were abandoned, usually for economic reasons.
The Essay on Do Women Really Work Harder Than Men
Do Women Really Work Harder Than Men? One of the standard feminist claims heard every March during International Womens Day and Womens History Month is that women do the work of the world. This argument was publicized by the United Nations during the 1970s (Women constitute one half of the worlds population [and] do two-thirds of the worlds work) and reinforced in 1995 with the release of its ...
The salons of French women were instrumental in spreading the ideas of the philosophes, but most of the philosophes were at best weak advocates of reforms that would help women. Some philosophes advocated improvements in education for women. But many philosophes – even the otherwise radical Rousseau! – had very traditional ideas about gender roles, and endorsed the double standard that frowned on female sexual expression. The beliefs that women were physiologically inferior to men, and that women’s activities and aspirations should be limited to the domestic sphere, were widely endorsed by philosophes. Late in the 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women placed women’s rights within the Enlightenment agenda.
Industrialization transformed the family from being the chief unit of both production and consumption, to being the chief unit of consumption only. This occurred slowly, and was not completed throughout Europe before the end of the 19th century. The textile factory system in Britain provides a good model for the types of changes that occurred in industrialized family structure. Early textile factories, in the 1820s, often employed whole families as a unit. By the 1830s, however, work associated with textile machinery had largely been split into skilled work, performed by men who were relatively well paid, and unskilled work, performed by poorly paid unmarried women and the children of poor hand-loom weavers. Child labor and education laws improved children’s working conditions, but further separated them from their families.
The Homework on Should Women Work Outside Home
Recently, many women are engaged in various kinds of job, and they have been advancing in society. Moreover, it is quite ubiquitous among typical families that a mother works outside the home. In the article Should a Woman Work Outside the Home?, the author Mohammed Akade Osman Sudan argues that a womans rightful place in society is in the home. I disagree with the authors view that women should ...
With industrialization, the gender division of labor that had characterized the middle class and aristocracy spread to the working class. Starting in the 1820s, factory work for women became more widely available, but it paid less. Wages for men in factories were often enough to support an entire family; in families where that was not the case, the children were more likely to enter the wage workforce than the wives were. Therefore, the women who worked in factories were generally young and single, or widowed. Even by
mid-century, more than half of all working women were still working someplace other than factories; in England, the largest group of working women were domestic servants, and in France they worked in agriculture. Domestic cottage industries employed huge numbers of women throughout Europe. In virtually all cases, however, women were poorly paid. Prostitution and sexual exploitation were widespread. Marriage and family life changed too, though slowly. Women’s domestic work – child-rearing, food preparation, cleaning, and often, administration of finances – became more sharply defined.
Women’s social roles remained largely static. A distinct strain of misogyny became evident in fiction and painting at the end of the 19th century. The scientific community, too, held a conservative and hostile view of women. Racial thinking often placed women on a lower plane than men of the same race. Biological thinking led social scientists to reinforce “traditional” roles – reproduction, child-rearing, nurturing – for women. Feminist groups worked to gain voting rights for women. They also questioned the double standard of sexual morality and the male domination of the family. Often they approached these issues through challenges to prostitution laws, which punished female prostitutes but not their customers. Some advocated contraception. Other feminists argued that women should be free to develop their personalities, while still others joined socialist movements and worked to incorporate a change for the role of women into the socialist agenda. Virginia Woolf articulated a vision of men and women both becoming aware of the full range of identities within each individual.
The Essay on Gender Roles & Family Structure Changes
Today, people realize and see that there is not the same consensus of family dynamics and lifestyles that the 1950's demonstrated when "the family life and gender roles became much more predictable" (Coontz 36). An analysis of Stephanie Coontz's, What We Really Miss About the 1950's, along with the episodes of Leave It To Beaver, have revealed certain roles and structure of a quintessential family ...
Gender inequality persists in Europe, despite the expanding economic and political roles women have occupied throughout Europe in the 20th century. Recent feminism has focused on criticizing fundamental elements of European culture (as has the European environmental movement), and on helping women as individuals take control of their own lives. European women have fewer children than in the past, which leaves them more time developing careers. Abortion, which was widely available in Europe, has reemerged as a political issue. Women in Eastern Europe were entitled to guarantees of equality and broad benefits; they are now learning how best to make their way in more free-market, democratic systems.
