Are you firmly rooted in the 1950's when it comes to your gender roles, or are you more modern in your viewpoints?

Much more modern.

I believe women have the right to work outside the home.

Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

Women can and should wear whatever they want.

My answer to this question explains it pretty well:
I consider personality traits to be on a sliding scale of how much an individual has or lacks any given trait, and I understand that statistically, certain traits are more common to those with the X gene and others are more common to those with the Y gene; but I personally have never have many of the traits that typically correspond with my X chromosome or my hetero-female sexual identity. As such, I’ve never expected anyone else to fall into stereotypical patterns, either.

I will add that at work, gender is an issue. I am a health care provider, but not a physician. Our field is mostly female, and only women are in my department with my current employer. In the attitudes of the physicians who own the practice, as well as the administrative and clerical staff there, we are viewed more on the level of the clerical staff than as being the educated, experienced clinicians that we are. This is demeaning and frustrating and undermines our ability to function within the practice to the best of our abilities.

Very modern, with the exception of not agreeing with women who choose to work in the sex industry.

I tried to be a masculine girl for a long time and found that it made much more sense to be a feminine boy.

@Coloma, what about men? Men and boys do sex work too.

@bookish1 Of course, I KNEW I should have included men, good catch, my bad. :-)

@Coloma Sex Work has to do with gender roles?

I am learning (to the OP) that I can take what I want and leave the rest. I live in a different society to you or most people here. So a lot of these questions sound antiquated. It strikes me as strange, since I live in a 3rd World country.

But yes, saying what you believe and having a Constitution that is fully based on equity is DIFFERENT to actually living it. This is the part I am grappling with.

I like to think of myself as a Woman of the the 21st Century, but my life trajectory has had me pretty firmly entrenched in the gender roles of the 1950’s. I didn’t go to college right out of high school and got a full time job. I quit working when I had my first son and have been a stay-at-home mom for fourteen years. I am finishing school now and getting ready to start a full time job, but I handle all of the housework (out of necessity though), cooking, and much of the child care.

I believe the husband should be head of the house because the Bible teaches this.

I grew up in the 50’s in a very stable family environment where the father was the breadwinner and the mother stayed at home to look after the home and the children. This is what I am familiar with. My mother went out to work when we were quite young and my father helped out around the house so the stereotypes weren’t exact. I remember them as good days. It worked for us.

I’m very much a modern man, why just last xmas I bought the wife a weekend pass allowing her out of the kitchen for a spell…....I know, i’m such a darling :¬)

@ucme That would be the spell that turned you into Santa?

Freedom and equality for both is what I say, and gender roles be damned.

@flutherother An ironic one at that.

I just do what feels right for our family and it’s not based on gender roles, though it may look like that to others. I’ve been a stay-at-home parent going on 12 years now. Having a parent home for the kids as they are growing up is important to my husband and me. When our sons were both still toddlers I went back to college, then worked for a couple years. I had no plans to stay home. I wanted to work. My husband also worked, and then there was a time when my husband was laid off and I was the only person working. The company I worked for ended up closing and I received a nice little severance package and was able to stay home with the kids. We noticed how much easier and less stressful it was for our kids and our family when one of us was home. My husband just happens to have more work experience than I do and is able to make more money than I can, so he works and I stay home. I’ll go back to work when my daughter is older. The nice thing about this arrangement is that I have a choice to do what I feel is right for our family at the time. Having a choice is modern, right?

@Shippy In many ways yes. Getting woman out of the kitchen and onto a stripper pole is rather ironic don’t you think? lol
Talk about out of the fire and into the frying pan.

When I married my wife, I was glad that she was staying home taking care of the kids. It is a luxury in today’s society, but we were able to do it. I don’t criticize anyone who has both parents working, or has the husband taking care of the kids.

@filmfann, excellent point that the housewife model is a financial luxury in many Western societies now.

Putting on my historian hat, people tend to speak far too vaguely about the gender models Western society had in “the 1950s.” The fact of the matter is that the female caretaker, male breadwinner model was often only accessible for middle/upper middle class white folks in the 1950s. (Poor women had to balance work and taking care of a household for more than a century.) It was part of the backlash against the gender displacements of World War II, where scores of women entered male-dominated jobs like industrial production and office work for the first time (and sometimes even became soldiers, as in the USSR). The models of domesticity we see in American television and movies from the 1950s and early-mid 1960s were part of a project to make Rosie the Riveter go back home, so men could take back over in jobs women had worked during World War II.

TL;DR: Gender roles are historically and socially contingent!

I do believe that it is okay if the woman goes out and works. You usually need two incomes in today’s world. But I think the husband should be the leader in the family, as long as he consults with the wife and considers her views.

I was raised in the 1950’s, but participated in the 1960’s free movement. I have lived long enough so far to see the pendulum swing back again, with a few exceptions.

I believe that women should be barefoot and pregnant.

Do you think that explains why I’m single?

Not only am I rooted in the 1950s, but I was born then. I grew up with a father who worked outside the home, and a mother who took care of the kids full time. In the 60s and 70s, my high school became one of the first to have boys take home ec and girls take shop. There was a ferment of feminism in my town, and eventually the area became known as the lesbian capital of,,,, well, I don’t know if it could be the world, but it was a big place for being friendly to lesbians and gays and feminists and anti-war and anti-nuke and all kinds of other progressive political positions.

But things have changed, and nowadays, people don’t seem to believe in feminism any more. Those who do, don’t know who their friends are and try to make enemies of them. Young women don’t seem to think feminism is important any more. Many seem to want a man to take care of them. They want to go back to the 1950s. That seems to me to be the modern way.

Perhaps it is all cyclical, but it makes me unhappy.

I am perfectly fine with strapping on a strap-on and

@wundayatta -Most women work outside the home so I don’t know what you are talking about that they want men to take care of them.

Just because most women work doesn’t mean they don’t also wish they could not work. The two are not incompatible.

Those 1950s gender roles applied to such a small population, in reality, if at all…I don’t really think about that time much. As I mentioned on a previous q, we don’t do anything according to gender roles in our relationship as gender is not significant to who we are as people, at all. At work, I am myself with students but I ‘play appropriate woman’ with colleagues, because that’s the political game and I intend to win it.

Definitely modern. I did stay home to take care of our children for 14 years, but if I’d been able to make more money than my then-husband did, we’d have switched places in a heartbeat. Like @jonsblond‘s family, it was important to us that someone do it, not that the mother do it.

I don’t think my views/actions are any different at home or work.

I believe the man should be the head of the household and his husband should stay in the kitchen, unless he has the permission of their sexual surrogate to leave, but only for purposes of procreation.

Seeing as I don’t cook and only clean when absolutely necessary I would say, no, I am not “firmly rooted in the 50’s” when it comes to gender roles, my boyfriend certainly doesn’t expect me to stay at home while he goes out to work. He is more knowledgable than me about fixing cars and enjoys DIY jobs more than I do but that doesn’t mean I can’t or won’t do them when needed and he is happy to do the cleaning (that I put off)!

@Coloma Some find it empowering. I personally don’t. I feel our power can be used elsewhere.