Woman's Role And Choice Between Marriage Vs. Career

There is a story in the Bible which claims that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam’s body. Thus, woman was part of man from the very outset. She was not an independent person, nor did she have an independent personality. She was unable to participate in politics or government. As a natural phenomenon, people always likened women to flowers, the moon, a light breeze. This, of course, placed them artificially in the category of “the gentle and lovely” and of “the weak,” and relegated them to the confines of the household. (The Dilemmas of Strong Women, 39)

History of women’s role in society wasn’t easy. A dominant ideology at the beginning of the 1800s was called Republican Motherhood: middle and upper-class white women were expected to educate the young to be good citizens of the new country. Another ideology was separate spheres: Women were to rule the domestic sphere (home and raising children) while men operated in the public sphere (business, trade, government. ) The duties of women were confined to the domestic space: raising children, taking care of household affairs and grooming their young daughters to find husbands. Legally, women were considered dependents until marriage and under coverture after marriage, with no separate identity and few or no personal rights including economic and property rights. One area of public life assumed by women was the role of a writer. Sometimes (as with the Bronte sisters in England), they would write under male pseudonyms and other times under ambiguous pseudonyms.

“It was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch [3]

To Eliot's Dorothea, the so-called 'separate spheres' of Victorian gender appear to be provinces of differing elevation with borders walled off by classical, masculine knowledge. Those outside the gates of the masculine realm, those squinting in the shadow of the peaks from which its inhabitants view the world of truth beyond, wallow in an obscure and doubtful province. This is the unlearned dystopia of the nineteenth-century woman, systematically denied a classical training. (Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and the Classical Inheritance: Introduction, 399)

Since 1950, the sources of gains that people can expect from marriage have changed rapidly and radically. As women’s educational attainment surpassed that of men and the ratio of men’s to women’s wages fell, the traditional pattern of gender specialization and division of labor in the household weakened. The primary source of gains to marriage shifted from production of household services to investment in children. (The Evolving Role of Marriage: 1950 –2010, 44)

A “quiet revolution” in American women’s careers, education, and family arrangements began in the 1970s. During the prosperous years of the post-war baby boom, couples married after leaving school, and most young mothers stayed at home with their children. Many mothers returned to the labor force when their children were grown, but their educational and career aspirations were shaped by domestic responsibilities. As fertility rates fell and women’s intermittent employment turned into lifetime commitments to market work and careers, the terms of the marital agreement changed. (The Evolving Role of Marriage: 1950 –2010, 30)

Shockingly today, there’s still countries that discriminate women and their right to achieve a career. In India family is a key social unit. Family is a multi-dimensional concept. Various aspects of family environment contribute to girls’ vocational aspiration. In Indian kinship system male members in the family are highly esteemed. Sons are considered assets whereas, daughters are the liabilities. In many families, education of male offspring takes precedence over the education of female offspring.

Saudi Arabia 

They cannot vote, they must have permission from their “male guardian” to travel, work, or marry, they cannot pass their nationality onto their children (only men can), and they face high rates of domestic violence. CHINA Gender inequality in the labor market has been found to be strongly associated with women’s marital status. While single women may even surpass single men in earnings, married women, especially those with children, are increasingly confronted by motherhood penalty in the labor market (244 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW)

But almost everywhere, women were and still are viewed to be mothers, nurturers, household caretakers and caregivers. Despite the strides we’ve seen women make today to get equal pay, secure jobs, and to have the freedom to work in fields that are predominately male dominated – women are still doing more work than ever. Their second jobs consist of the household chores and “duty” of raising children.

So, what do we choose living in todays world as women? Is marriage becoming a setback for women who want to achieve things professionally? As women, our paths are no longer restricted to birth, adolescence, college, then jumping the broomstick and having children. Our goal should be to accomplish our dreams, seeing the world, having adventures and figuring out our own wants, motivations and needs. Women of generations X and Y heard the “you can have it all” proclamation loud and clear--that marriage, children, and an unfettered career could co-exist if you want it all badly enough. But what was meant as a freeing, empowering statement turned out to be a bit of a lie. Young women observe their family-centric sisters living guilt-ridden, overburdened lives, where they often don’t make it on to their own list of pressing priorities. When deciding between being stretched to the maximum versus managing a life created completely on your own terms, no wonder many women don’t see unending promise in getting married. Against the background of almost universal belief that women's status has improved relative to men, a stream of skeptical reports has recently emerged in the United States that describe an 'opt-out revolution' among educated and economically successful women who have left careers for full-time homemaking.. About half are satisfied and half resentful. She attributes their decisions to the iron grip of a career schema in the financial world that brooks no compromise with family needs. The worker is expected to be fully devoted to career obligations in order to reach the top. Long working hours and unexpected demands require the worker to delegate responsibility for family life to someone else (a 'wife'). Highly successful women (accountants, lawyers, brokers, and bankers) have so internalized this ethic, and the workplace is so hostile to any compromise, that when they choose to have a family, they are forced to choose between devotion to career and to family. Many feel they have no other alternative than to lower their career aspirations or give them up altogether. The dominant cultural schema (of being either a full-time worker or full-time mother) is so entrenched in the American workplace that the objective of work-family policy to increase flexibility and accommodation between job and home is more or less doomed from the start. (395, Homemaker or Career Woman: Life Course Factors and Racial Influences among Middle Class Americans)

Counterargument

How should we understand what appears to be such a discrepant picture of gender /«equality alongside growing equality? Economist Claudia Goldin (2006) contends that the opt-out women are a tiny minority and that their importance is being exaggerated relative to the reality. Citing a longitudinal study of women college alumnae conducted fifteen years after graduation, she notes that 79 percent were still married, and that the 69 percent with at least one child had spent only 2.1 years on average out of the labor force. Fully 50 percent of those with children had never had a non-employment (or non-educational) spell lasting more than six months. A University of Chicago study by Schneider and Waite (2005) of 500 professional and executive families with two working parents paints a picture that is compatible with the Goldin account. The most satisfied of these couples were agreed on roles and decision-making whereas the less satisfied appeared to be held together by their sense of obligation as parents or their common religious values. Husbands felt more positive at home than at work or in public, whereas wives show marked positive feelings about their public roles. The fact that men found time with family more satisfying, and that women were more engaged and happy when at work or in public settings, could be a sign that positive feelings are associated with being in a setting that women and men 'choose' rather than in one that imposes traditional gender obligations on them (Schneider and Waite, 2005).