My feminism paper: American society prides itself on its social freedoms and egalitarian values. Democracy has had a rich legacy in American history, and indeed great strides have been made within our nation to construct a more equitable social code, one that deviates less and less from the promise of “liberty and justice for all,” recited daily in our Pledge of Allegiance. However, despite advances, tremendous sex-based inequalities still exist. A woman employed fulltime earns a startling 75 cents to the likewise fulltime employed man's dollar, more than one half of poor families are headed by a single mother, and more than twice as many elderly women are impoverished when compared to the number of men in the same age bracket.[1]
Vast inequalities between male and female social status are no longer borne out of legal mandates, but out of underlying conceptions about gender-based obligations. Though legal provisions have attempted to establish female equality within the workforce, few provisions have done the same for the protection of justice within the domestic sphere, and the advancement of women has continued to be tyrannized by antiquated social dictations and constraints. The expectation and actuality of the division of labor between household management and money earning within the home creates a dynamic of power that devalues female contributions and emasculates their social, economic and political influence. Moreover, despite rapidly expanding female employment, archaic gender expectations still define marriage and childrearing, forcing even working women to make unfortunate decisions between their careers and their families. Fundamentally, it’s the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid resources within the institution of marriage that leaves women economically and socially vulnerable; domestic inequality that transcends into every facet of American society. Wedding rings, in many respects, dignify the suspension of social justice.
The institution of marriage is a social relic; a vestige of a time when gender roles were cemented firmly in place and women wielded no political or economic power. Socially constructed concepts of “gender obligation” helped lay the framework for “matrimonial obligation,” and sex-based stereotypes became constituent to marriage’s existence. Certain sexes, it was once believed, were naturally relegated to certain spheres within society; men, of course, asserted themselves as being intellectually and physically dominant, and roles in society were sorted with such conceptions in mind.
Though many of the arguments made throughout the centuries about the biological inferiority of women have fallen out of favor, the patriarchal power structures that naturally extended from these beliefs, to a large extent still exist and thrive within today’s society: despite increasing female participation in the workforce, it is still widely assumed that a certain division of labor should position women as the primary caretakers and men as the primary money earners. Marriage throughout the ages has served as a bulwark of the status quo, amidst great tides of liberalization. Though women have drastically increased their potential to affect change in modern society, a result largely achieved due to the efforts made during the upsurge of feminism within the 1970s, the institution of marriage continues to propagate a repressive power structure that prevents women from getting ahead.
Wanna know how? Read the rest of the paper here.
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