Family structures, dynamics, and contemporary issues

¶ … women have been seen in society has changed dramatically over the years. This change can be seen in many different areas having to do with women. The first area is that of reproduction. No issue regarding women's liberation has been as hotly debated as the one surrounding birth control. In the begging feminist and non-feminists alike did not support the idea of birth control. It was expected that women would not only give birth but would perform all the nurturing functions that cam along with it. It was not until the twentieth century that the feminists changed their minds. Although they still greatly supported women working they began to see the hardships that women working outside of the home brought about. Women were often politically immobilized by sexism and yet had exclusive responsibilities for large families. Having rejected the religious avenue and the traditional morality view they began to see that liberating possibilities for women in they had freer sex lives.

Today feminist positions about birth control can be seen emphasized in individual issues. These issues include abortion, sterilization and abuse. In thinking about the family, contemporary views contain ambivalence between individualism and its assessment. The individualism has reached a much higher development with the challenge to gender definitions. The rejection of gender is an ultimate commitment to all people to develop to their greatest potential. The view in turn shatters the traditional allocation of sex roles that has existed for the longest time.

In the past sex-role allocation developed from how children were raised, by the sexual division of labor that occurred and by the cultural definitions of what was appropriate for the sexes. Back in the day, the man went to work everyday and the woman staying home and raised the children. This is how it was in every household and thus it was expected as generations progressed. The man was seen as the provider and the woman as the nurturer in the family. Because of these pre-defined roles that most people grew up with, when the time came that is was necessary for women to work outside of the home, it was a concept that was not readily accepted by most men. Due to the fact that men dominated and controlled the working world, having women enter this arena was not exactly equality driven. Women were still seen as the nurturer of the world and thus often ended up doing caring kinds of work.

Caring work often comprises providing face-to-face services such as child care, teaching, therapy and nursing. These jobs often pay low relative to their education and skill requirements. Due to the fact that caring work is often associated with women cultural sexism prevents the recognition of the value of this kind of work. It is thought that caring labor pays less because it associated with women and their traditional mothering role. Because of this view female jobs tend to pay less than sex integrated jobs or those that are only filled by males.

The feminist explanations of how families function and contribute to maintaining women's subordination have transferred in the past decade from those that stressed sex roles and socialization to those that portray processes of categorization and stratification by gender. The focus has moved to families operating to construct gender through the symbolic and structural dimensions of labor, both paid and unpaid, and through the control over income within the family. Gender models have moved theorizing about families away from the emphasis on dichotomies such as public or private, love or money, traditional or modern, and toward recognition of the diverse and contested nature of gender conventions. Rather than positing two opposite, comprehensive, consistent, and exclusive sex roles, the new thought identifies a variety of actively gendered roles that link families with other social institutions.

Throughout history women have been treated unequally just because they are women. There may have been a point in time when this unequal treatment was what worked then. But this is not longer the case. For many years women have been told what they could or could not do. In the beginning the issues surrounded those of birth control and family planning. Because women are the ones who have the babies they were delegated to the role of nurturer and this has been a role that has been very hard to shake over the years. When women stayed at home and raised the children and took care of the house while the men worked this was seen as the norm and people didn't question it. That is the way it had always been done and thus it continued to be done that way. It wasn't until it became necessary for women to work outside of the home that things began to change.