Question

Question 1

It is often easier to see manifestations of women’s oppression in cultures other than our own, since they don’t seem “natural” to us. However, as we have seen in class, for every issue we have located in “other cultures” we can find an analogous manifestation in the culture(s) of the United States that reveals a shared rootedness in patriarchal society. Offer and explain U.S. analogues to three of the following: stark division of gender roles, son preference, child marriage, and control of women’s sexuality.

Answer 1

I have come with the statements and theories.
1)Gender Roles in the United States
With the popularization of social constructionist theories of gender roles, it is paramount that one recognize that all assertions about gender roles are culturally and historically contingent. This means that what might be true of gender roles in the United States for one cultural group likely is not true for another cultural group. Similarly, gender roles in the United States have changed drastically over time. There is no such thing as a universal, generalizable statement about gender roles.

One main thread in discussions about gender roles in the United States has been the historical evolution from a single-income family or a family unit in which one spouse (typically the father) is responsible for the family income, to a dual-income family, or a family unit in which both spouses generate income. Before the rise of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and the influx of women into the workforce in the 1980s, women were largely responsible for dealing with home matters, while men worked and earned income outside the home. While some claim that this was a sexist structure, others maintain that the structure simply represented a division of labor or a social system in which a particular segment of the population performs one type of labor and another segment performs another type

2) Child Marriage
There is no publicly available government data on child marriage in the United States.

Internationally there is growing recognition that child marriage is a human rights violation and a severe impediment to social and economic development. As a leading donor for international development, the United States can play an important role in the global movement to end child marriage.

The Trump administration’s 2018 budget has proposed complete elimination of all funding for reproductive health and family planning, which could have a detrimental impact on efforts internationally to address child marriage.

3) Women sexuality
In the United States, the first large-scale study of sexual behavior was that by Kinsey and his colleagues (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953). Their efforts, however, were predated by Terman’s (Terman, Buttenwieser, Ferguson, Johnson, & Wilson, 1938) more focused analysis of sexual behaviors, practices, and preferences in the context of marriage. Terman was specifically interested in the role of a couple’s sexual relationship in their marital adjustment and headed one of the first research groups to study in detail such aspects as the frequency of intercourse, relative “passionateness” of the spouses, refusal of intercourse, orgasm, duration of intercourse, the wife’s response to first intercourse, contraceptive practices, the wife’s desire, and each individual’s sexual complaints about the other. In the Kinsey interviews, conducted with thousands of women and men, the focus was similar, yet with a life-span orientation. They included the following: preadolescent heterosexual and homosexual play; masturbation; nocturnal sex emissions and dreams; heterosexual petting; premarital, marital, and extramarital coitus; intercourse with prostitutes (for men only); homosexual contacts; animal contacts; and, finally, the total sexual outlet, defined as the sum of the various activities which culminated in orgasm. Other topics that are now recognized as important to sexual development (and perhaps the subsequent occurrence of sexual dysfunctions), such as incest and other traumatic sexual experiences, received less coverage.