Domestic Equality in Childcare

Domestic Equality In Childcare

After reading and interpreting, as well as searching through memories in reference to a selection written by Armin A. Brott titled, “Not All Men Are Sly Foxes”, and Judy Brady titled, “I Want A Wife”, you get the idea that domestic equality in child-raising is a learned behavioral science as well as a product of the current era in time. The essays written by these authors display domestic inequalities in different eras; Brady describes the 1970’s and Brott, the early 1990’s. In addition to these 2 eras in time, I will be discussing a third, the 1980’s, when I was raised. These two essays equally composed the concept that we then, and still do, live in a society divided by the perception of life and life’s gender roles learned during the years of infancy, youth, and adulthood.

The story told by Judy Brady, I am sure, is a built-up, well-acquired cry out for help due to the overload of care taking for the children, husband, and the home. However, this essay contains a distinctively negative insight to marriage in the twentieth century. Although the time frame of Brady’s essay was set in the early 1970’s, it creates a time-cultural bias, when speaking of a wife’s duties and responsibilities.

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Through the course of reading Judy Brady’s essay, “I Want A Wife”, She appeared to be hurt by possibly a personal situation in which she experienced inequitable treatment. Brady reaches out to her audience not as in writing an informative piece, but as a sort of beware of what a wife and mother truly is, the household secretary. Judy Brady may have just been a slave to the times in which she lived. At this time, women didn’t work. Men were the “bread winners”, of the home. A wife’s duties were to specifically take care of all the bills, cleaning, majority of childcare, schedule Dr. appointments, cooking, and everything else domestic. While on the other hand, a man’s duties were to work the long hours, travel, discipline the children, and make sure the home is secure and kept current, as far as the physical structure went.

Brady’s essay was a form of an outreach to the women of her era; however, this theory or complaint is no longer valid. Not to be misunderstood, in the United States of America, there is still a certain level acceptance of the typical housewife role and women are still even expected to perform some of these same tasks but this problem is no more severe than the rest of the cultural bias’ we experience daily within race, language, and personal beliefs in this country.

While reading Armin A. Brott’s, “Not All Men Are Sly Foxes”, written in the early 1990’s, I interpreted this essay as another written form of an outreach to a society that miss-portrays a man’s child-raising capabilities. I am knowledgeable about the past

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gender roles for women and men, but as I stated before, these were times of the past. The children’s stories that Armin A. Brott spoke of still relate to the times of the past; however, they are more time relative than the hardships spoken of by Brady. In reading Armin Brott’s essay, you can understand and visualize his train of thought due to Mr. Brott having current literature to support his notions. Within Brady’s essay, you get the idea that this is more of a complaint, possibly from a past or ongoing experience. Within Brott’s essay, we are given specific examples of females being portrayed as the family source of compassion and nurture. In this example, Armin refers to a children’s story by the name of, “Mother Goose and the Sly Fox. In this story, the mother was pitted against a fox where she, being supportive and nurturing, fights off and outwits the sly fox. What is visibly missing from the story? Where is the father? In this example, the father is out of the picture or assumed neglectful, as in most children’s fairy-tales.

Growing