The Fictions that Shape Men's Lives by Christopher Kilmartin

Author:Christopher Kilmartin [Kilmartin, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Men's Studies
ISBN: 9781000375442
Google: Li0hEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-04-20T05:07:13+00:00

5

GOOD OLD DAYS

The fiction of the bygone romantic era

Every so often, I encounter someone who laments about how much things have changed with regard to gender, ending with something like, “Wouldn’t it be great to go back to a time when life was simpler and families were traditional?” Generally, they are referring to an idealized version of 1950s United States mainstream culture, when the dominant model was the (male) single wage earner and the (female) full time homemaker.

Would it be great? If so, for whom? Certainly not for women with career ambitions. Certainly not for men who wished they did not have to shoulder the burden of being the only economic provider in the family. Certainly not for people of modest means who needed two incomes to make ends meet. And by the way, also not for people who were not heterosexual, cisgender, white, or who otherwise had identities outside of the mainstream models. It turns out that this 1950s model was “traditional” only in the narrowest historical sense, and so it is important for students of gender studies to gain a historical perspective on how a gendered sectionision of labor came about and what factors influenced it. And then, if we can understand these factors, we can make some informed prediction about where gender arrangements are likely to be in the future.

In 1986, Gerda Lerner published The Creation of Patriarchy, a historical examination of the factors that led to men’s dominance over women in public life beginning some 6,000 years ago. She argued that gendered social arrangements are a product of a gendered sectionision of labor that met the needs of most societies at the time. As you will see, this gendered sectionision of labor is increasingly becoming a gendered non-sectionision of labor. I am not so naïve to believe that the inequality between the sexes will be resolved during my lifetime or even during the lifetimes of any of my readers. After all, it took us thousands of years to get here and the system is not easily dismantled. But if one accepts the argument contained within this chapter, the conclusion is that progress, measured in the expansion of roles for both men and women, is inevitable given the factors that allow for more flexibility in our working lives, which will also lead to more flexibility in our lives outside of work.

We start with a very brief description of the great epochs of human labor. Everyone started out as hunter/gatherers. In fact, at least 98% of human existence was spent in these foraging societies. Then people learned how to grow food, domesticate animals, and stay in one place rather than roaming around looking for food that came solely from nature with no human intervention. At that point, agricultural societies began to dominate the world’s economies, although foraging societies continued to exist (and still do in some parts of the world). As agricultural methods, especially machinery, developed so successfully, not everyone had to be farmers, as a small number of people could produce enough food for everyone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.