1. Feminist: Action against oppression of any form. Collective view of what enhances a concept of a caring…
In this essay I will be assessing the contribution of feminist sociologists to an understanding of family roles and relationships. There are different roles in families such as: Conjugal; where both the partners share task such as housework and childcare, the opposite of this would be segregated roles; where the couples have separate roles, the male is breadwinner and has the instrumental role and the female is the housewife and has the expressive role. A dual earner is a couple…. A single parent is a person who has been divorced or been widowed and has to take care of the children they had with the previous partner. Furthermore there are different types of relationships between families such as equal; where the husband and wife both have an equal say and are treated equally, however it can be one-sided; where the husband or wife are more dominant which can lead to domestic violence, it could also be democratic; where the family all vote for something instead of one person taking the decisions, but it can also be patriarchal; where the male take the main decisions and Is the breadwinner. A feminist is a person that argues that sociology has traditionally taken a ‘male stream’ perspective and ignores female viewpoint; they examine women’s experiences and study society from a female’s perspective. There are different types of feminism: Liberal, Marxists, Radical and Difference Feminism. They all tend to be critical of the nature of a women’s role and relationship inside families because they see them as grossly patriarchal, oppressive and unfair, as mentioned in Item B. On the other hand, the different types of feminist don’t agree with each other’s perspective on ideas of families and households, and they tend to clash.…
Sarah Clark Miller, in “Global Needs and Care” presents the argument that Kant’s duty based ethics and Ruddick’s care based ethics are incomplete and that her cosmopolitan care based ethics provide better reasoning for the global responsibility to care for distant others. Her argument is that we are morally obligated to respond to fundamental needs and therefore, we have a duty to care. This idea of the duty to care brings us back to Kant’s ethics, which she says provides a moral foundation for the obligation to care but doesn’t portray the content of the duty and how it should be carried out. She criticizes Sarah Ruddick’s care based ethics by saying that it assumes that some people care but does not address why or whether it is important for everyone to care. Her view is a combination of the two and hopes to complete the story about the duty to care.…
Firstly one must look at the division of domestic labour and conjugal roles. Conjugal roles refer to the roles performed by men and women in relation to housework, childcare and paid work. Traditionally men had the instrumental ‘bread-winning’ role which the women had the expressive role (childcare and primary socialisation). Feminists say that the traditional division of labour is neither natural nor beneficial to women as their expressive role is unpaid and taken for granted. However different feminist views disagree on who benefits from this unpaid labour. Marxist feminists would argue it is capitalism that benefits most as wives keep their husbands happy and therefore they are left with a content workforce. On the other hand, radical feminists would argue that men are the main people to gain from women’s oppression as we live in a patriarchal society. A functionalist view from Wilmott and Young says that there has been a ‘march of progress’ in which the family has become more symmetrical with more joint conjugal roles (where both partners share the household labour). However feminists reject this view with Oakley arguing the family still remains patriarchal and Boulton saying the evidence to support the alleged rise in symmetry is weak, and that the responsibility for childcare still lies with women.…
Tong, R., Williams, N.(2009,May 4) Feminist Ethics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Fall 2009 Edition). Retrieved June 22, 2010, from SEP: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/feminism-ethics/…
Thus the mindset of many is that women are to take on the caregiver careers. The skill sets and jobs that are thought to be women’s work such as nurses, teachers, sale clerks, nannies, home health aide, and secretaries. Which often makes me think that by encouraging women to enter into these fields is a way of controlling and ensuring that women will always be in need of a man. The salaries for the jobs listed above are significantly lower than the salaries of the career paths that males are encouraged to obtain.…
Noddings, N. (2003). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.…
One, The nature/nurture problem fosters concerns over our aptitude to ensure that the change of genderized ethics really heads in the right path. There is also the preceding question of whether or not reform is even likely because our genderized viewpoints might actually echo innate differences rather than the effects of socialization. Two, Perhaps the utmost key challenge for care ethics is to reconcile the seemingly conflicting moral implications of caring and justice. Three, the significance of relationships in care ethics, finally, draws notice to the difficulties that arise as we attempt to extend the concept of relationships to support obligations toward distant inhabits and toward…
On the other hand, some sociologists such as Morgan(1996) argue that women now take part in an act known as the ‘Triple Shift’, this is when women go out and work, but then also do domestic work when at home and give emotional support to partner and children. As a result, many feminists would argue that the roles and relations of couples are not equal, but actually unfair, the woman is doing so much more than her partner. This views result in some sociologist believing that roles and relations have changed in compare to the past, but in a path towards the woman doing more work than the man, making her the ‘breadwinner’.…
Women have fought throughout history in order to achieve different roles as well as to acquire recognition, independence, equality and respect. It has not been easy since they have had many barriers to overcome; their role in the family as wives, mothers and daughters; their role in society fighting for their rights, being heard and treated as men; their role as career women, not only receiving an education but also being able to work.…
A women’s life is centered around her reproductiveness and ability to be a caregiver. For example, there are significantly more women in elementary education than there are in higher education. In contrast, since men are unable to bare children, they have time after time been responsible for providing the necessary for the his family, while “their” women stay at home carrying over the children, maintaining a clean household, and being responsible for all their needs. Since men tend to be stronger and bigger than women, this ultimately has lead society to believe that men are more dominant than women; hence, women are often portrayed as weak and vulnerable. These biological characteristics translate to cultural myths about what a man or women can or cannot do; therefore, discriminating gender. This male dominance and privilege has contributed to the notion that men hold more power roles than women. In addition, being naturally more violent and at higher rates than women has contributed to the myth that men are better leaders. Today, men are in charge of significantly close to most if not all of the largest corporations. If a women happens to be part of the leading group of one of these corporations, it leads to question whether she has the position in order to increase diversity or because she deserves and worked hard to be there. It is is unfortunate that society promotes that women are simply not good enough for the…
The normative theory of ethics of care is a theory about what makes actions right or wrong. It is one of the ethical theories that were developed by feminists care scholars in the second half of the twentieth century. Ethics of care criticizes the applications of universal standards as a moral problem as it creates differences among people. Children are born with many talents and they have to be given an opportunity to develop these capabilities. It is really important that children are provided with proper care by their parents irrespective of their gender. Male and female children have to be treated equally from their developmental stages for them to mimic the same behavior in the future with their childten. It creates a healthy society where care is shared…
Thus, in an attempt to further promote equal opportunity between men and women, a second wave of feminism emerged between 1968 and the 1980’s, which can be best characterized by women’s refusal to acclimate to society’s rigid belief of what an ideal woman should be or act like (Mancia, Class, 12/2). This problem is perfectly illustrated in the Feminine Mystique, written by Betty Friedan, in which Friedan discussed the unhappiness of many young women in the 1950’s and early 1960’s despite many of them being married and having children, living the life a woman is “supposed” to have. Furthermore, Friedan complained of young women who were being taught that “truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights” (Friedan, p. 271). Instead, they were being taught that it was a woman’s “job” to essentially be a housewife (i.e. stay home, clean the house, make food for her family, take care of the kids, etc...) (Friedan, p. 273). However, Friedan largely opposed this view and believed that it embodied the false prototypical stereotype about women. Rather, Friedan believed that a truly feminine woman would do just the exact opposite and does aim for a career, higher education, and political rights in the same way that a man would (Mancia, Class,…
During the 14th century, the Alexian Brothers demonstrated the universality of caring. They were men in the military and religious sects. They helped the sick, poor and the dying. Nursing started as a male-predominant profession (Hogan, R., 2016). Understanding the history of nursing provided an insight that the origin of nursing came from the act of caring. We are all capable of caring. As we emerged into our roles in the society, several factors influence our choices as to who we want to become. Over the last centuries, we see strong men as doctors, engineers, military people and on the other hand, women were seen as less important to the society. Women mainly cared for the family. According to the article, "Nursing History, Theories and…
This productive labour force includes work such as household chores; the care of elderly, adults and youth; the socialisation of children and the maintenance of social ties in the family (Parrenas, 2000). These activities are generally relegated to women, until recently. Class-privileged women free themselves of the mental, emotional and manual labour needed for the cultural and social upbringing of children, by hiring low-paid women generally of colour (Parrenas, 2000). The international transfer of caretaking is a social, political and economic relationship between women and the labour market (Parrenas, 2000). This relationship is based on the class, race, gender and citizenship of the women (Parrenas, 2000). In the new international division of reproductive labour you look one step deeper into the division of labour. Race in the division of labour is an international context where it is a transnational division of labour which is shaped by global capitalism, gender inequality in the sending country, global south, and gender inequality in the receiving country, global north (Parrenas, 2000). This hierarchy of womanhood that is based on race, class and nationality creates a system of reproductive labour among women. The construction of the new international division of reproductive labour uses gender as a central questioning lens for…