Gender Roles, for how long?

Growing up our household was extremely old fashioned as far as gender roles are concerned. My mother cooked and cleaned, my father took care of the outside of the house and was head of the household. As I began to get older my father always told me that I had to learn how to cook and clean or no one would ever marry me. Of course being a girl in public school in the 21 century I always told him that I did not care and I knew that he was wrong. I figured that in this day in age the work should be evenly split between husband and wife, both would do an equal amount of work and switch off different chores.

Although as I began to get older I also noticed that in our society it is more difficult to stray from the gender roles than it is to just continue them. More women are teachers, nurses and secretaries and more men are engineers, doctors, and mechanics. Generally women talk about how well they can cook and men talk about how well they can fish. This reminds me of Leppert’s article when he wrote about how women look at themselves as they would be looked at and men do the looking. We create a society that does not make them equal. So how could we possibly find an equal way to divide any sort of house work? The way that we socially construct our world inevitably adds to the continuation of stereotypical gender roles.

For example when a man says he is a nurse people tend to think of him differently, someone like my father would think he’s extremely feminine. Just like in the movie Meet the Fockers when Gaylord says he is a nurse the family makes a joke out of it. When in reality he is just a man that wants to do what makes him happy regardless of how “masculine” he is. Nevertheless I do believe we are moving forward to overcome this obstacle it is just going to take quite a bit of time. More people will take on the roles of their opposite gender and soon it will become “normal” for men to be nurses. A more open mind and a willingness to work for change can end the practice of stereotypical gender roles.