Gender Roles In The End Of Men By Hanna Rosin

1706 Words7 Pages
Gender roles are a fascinating subject to study, especially because they are shifting so rapidly. Hanna Rosin, the author of The End of Men, has a very straightforward stance on the current state of gender roles in America. She makes it clear that she believes women are starting to over power men in several key areas and presents strong evidence to back up that claim. Some of her main arguments about the rising status of women in the family and in the workforce are related to women’s more frequent monetary contributions to the family as a result of better education. While Rosin agrees with many scholars regarding women becoming dominant in the family due to factors such as their increasing roles as head of household, and that women are becoming…show more content…
Historically, African Americans’ sole purpose in America was for labor. They would slave for hours on end and receive little to no pay. Oddly enough, more equality was present between men and woman in slave families in comparison to white families. The way that the slave owners treated the men and women slaves was very similar. This was a leading cause to the more equal workload between men and women in slave families. Nonetheless, women still took on more labor than men in a slave family. Similar to present-day white women, “Being a woman of color in nineteenth-century American society meant having extra work both inside and outside the home” (Dill 1994:72). As soon as black men were no longer slaves and began to participate in the labor market, there was still a sense of inequality among the races. The amount of paid jobs available to African American men was drastically lower than the amount of paid jobs available to white men. African American men were struggling to find jobs; therefore, they were eager to let their wives work outside the home to provide some financial assistance (Cherlin 2014:104). Consequentially, “…The labor market challenges that black men and women faced provided the opportunity for a more flexible set of family roles, with less emphasis on the single-earner nuclear family than white men and women faced” (Cherlin 2014:55).…show more content…
Social class is usually divided into three primary categories based on economic standing: upper class, middle-class, and lower class. The upper class consists of the wealthiest people and the lower class consists of the poorest people. The middle-class is basically everyone who falls in between the upper class and lower class. As a result of social class shaping family structure, “…Marital relationships that are appropriate to middle-class white families are less effective for families that must cope with economic deprivation…” (Coontz 2010:44). Family dynamics that work for one class are rarely feasible for another class. For example, an extravagant lifestyle lived by an upper class family that consists of mansions, sports cars, and yearly vacations is a concept that would be foreign to a lower class or possibly even a middle-class family. As a result, women are seeking to either make more money on their own or marry someone with as much money as possible. Women do not typically aim to marry someone who is in the lower, working-class because that would not provide enough financial security. Also, functional marriages among lower-class people who both have jobs are less common because women want men who can provide for them financially (Cherlin 2014:4; Cherlin 2014:15). The diminishing amount of men being able to provide for women has changed the typical family structure
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