Today I put together a very short paper, only for those who have been curious what I keep writing about here is a quick two hour thrown together, due at 6:00pm today kind of paper. This is for the Women's Studies course I am studying in, one of the many courses I have studied, and thankfully this is an intro course otherwise I might be in trouble on this one! lol The more in-depth the studies, the more intricate I weave my papers, which, as I have mentioned, is not the case on this one.
For those of you who are not the least bit interested in sitting around reading a blog, I'll be posting my usual photo of the day post later on this evening. Until then, enjoy your day!
I am currently interviewing a male resident at the (I removed the residence to keep confidentiality), this resident is eighty three years old, divorced and has family living in Edmonton. For the purpose of this paper, and in keeping confidentiality, I am going to use a pseudonym and call this individual Ray.
In comparing the family structure and choices of men and women from early to mid 1900s to today's society, times have changed drastically. A few key points which are no longer the norms in today's society are: the man was the one who went out to work and the wife generally stayed home and ran the house. When women did work outside of the home they were paid less and expected to do domestic work, such as clerical, nursing, or teaching, to name a few occupations women first emerged into. The history of how women came to be in the work force is addressed in Shaw and Lee's (2009) book titled Women's voices, Feminist visions, with specific reference to history found in chapter 8: Women's Work Inside and Outside the Home. Due to space restrictions I will address a small portion of women and the work force.
In terms of income, Ray shared with me that shortly after he married he made three dollars a day for working on the farm, his wife could have also worked and earned two dollars a day. A combined income of five dollars a day would have helped the couple to attain their goals sooner than they did, the additional income would have allowed a more comfortable life for them to begin their future together. When Ray met his bride to be he was working on a farm as a farm hand, his wife was the daughter of the gentleman who owned the farm where Ray was employed. After the marriage Ray and his new bride moved away from her family and Ray went to work on another farm doing the same type of work. The work Ray did was hard physical labor and the days were long out in the fields. The work his wife was offered, and never accepted, would have been cooking and cleaning, domestic work. The work was not the same with one being more physically intensive, and domestic chores being not as physically intensive, yet should the couple have received equal pay? Shaw and Lee (2009) explain "Women and men tend to work in different kinds of jobs and the jobs women hold are valued and rewarded less" (p. 446). The wage gap has been an ongoing struggle for women for many years, this is by no means a current issue.
Ray shares with me more on his wife; he claims that she never wanted to work, she liked staying at home and looking after the house, that is until the two youngest twin girls were nine years old. It was shortly after the twins turned nine Ray's wife vocalized her desire to work. Ray shares that he did not have a problem with her going to work, he told her that he would stay home with the children as he felt that they were too young to be left on their own. I interpret this as an unwillingness to seek other options of child care, the children could have stayed with relatives, a babysitter, or possibly a neighbor until one parent returned home from work. The wife stayed home for a few more years until the children were a bit older, then she went out to work. I question her choices in regards to staying home, even though she vocalized she wanted to work, if she stayed home to appease her husband and his wishes. The couple, it seems, could not have afforded to live off of only Ray's wife's income if she were to go to work and Ray stayed home to tend to the children. Ray's wife eventually did go to work, she went to work making considerably less money than Ray did, but she was working nonetheless.
In assessing this situation I feel that this may have been a form of intimidation or control, I question if Ray would have wanted to stay home and tend to the domestic duties of maintaining a home with three girls and a wife to cook and clean for, or if he was inadvertently keeping his wife at home without realizing he was doing so. People often do not like change, this would have been an immense change to have the wife working. If both adults worked outside the home they would have to work hard to keep up to the house and home while both having external stressors of work and everyday life. The other question which comes to mind is would the family have been able to live off of the wife's earnings? It is known that "women earn less money than men on the average..." (Shaw & Lee, 2009, p. 446), the question then is could the wife have made adequate money to support the household and feed the family while Ray stayed home and tended to the families needs? Ray sadly shares with me that he was away working for lengthy periods of time while employed with Canadian National Railways, he vocalizes something which I believe a lot of parents feel or think after their children are grown and have families of their own; he wishes that he would have spent more time with his children when they were young. As his daughters were growing up Ray worked, and from the sounds of it he worked hard, his employment often seen him gone from home for long hours, sometimes for days at a time. Rays eyes glaze over for a few brief seconds as he reminisces, he shares in retrospect that money is not all that important, they could have easily gotten by on what he would have earned without putting in all of the additional hours. He sighs heavily, he wanted to give his family everything he possibly could. He ensured each of the family members were well provided for, they never wanted for anything in terms of food, shelter and necessities. Ray proudly boasts how well his children are doing today. I can see and feel the pride Ray has for his three daughters, yet I can hear and see his remorse.
Times have changed immensely since Ray and his wife reared their children. Today it is not so much a matter of choice if one parent has the desire to stay at home with the children, not with "[t]he average sale price of residential listings... from $310k to $312,840..." in Edmonton (Johnston, 2011, para. 3). To be "successful" and to be able to provide for a family, both parents have to work to afford a house and maintain a decent standard of living. Even though families today are much smaller than they were in the black and white days, the average family has less children then was the "norm" for the early to middle nineteen hundreds when families often consisted of seven or more children. Is it no wonder people do not have as many children today? The time and energy which used to be devoted to rearing children is now focused on work and with daycare's in high demand today, anybody with young children can attest to the waiting lists to put a child or children into daycare and the cost is astronomical. The situation really is a catch 22, if one parent stays home to rear the children and maintain the home, without an executive salary, a home is not a possibility. Rents are astronomical, the cost of food and daily living expenses are atrocious. Both parents need to work. Have we really made progress? Today strangers are raising our children. We live in an instant society
where everything is at our fingertips, we have access to instant food, instant communication, (yet nobody ever
really communicates anymore), instant banking, instant photos to capture our hurried memories, and it seems
that we seek instant gratification in all we do. We have everything and we have it quick, everything except
time to spend with children and offer them the nurturing and love children require to grow up into healthy
adults. Times are changing, the roles of all family members has changed immensely over the course of this
past seventy years, and they continue to change at a very fast pace.
References
