Summary Of Halving The Double Day By Dorothy Sue Woolf

Stephanie Coontz started off her article about the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique”, which was written about the women’s movement of the 1960s. What Coontz is trying to explain is that gender equality is not stalled, but “It has hit a wall”. Her title is the opposite of what she is trying to write about in the article. At first she talked about women’s rights back when the book was written. Instead of blaming the beliefs of gender roles from individuals, she points the finger at the economy and the work-family policies as the major problems to gender equality. She explains the gender equality stalled during 1990s and the first few years of the 2000s. She brought into text the usual statics, “the percentage of Americans preferring the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model actually rose to 40 percent from 34 percent. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased to 60 percent from 48 percent. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said full-time work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16 percent of stay-at-home mothers wanted to work full time.”(Coontz) She also talked about how 70 percent of men and women want an egalitarian relationship and how the demand of work has intensified.

Woolf starts of by mentioning “Society concerned with the employment of women” (1). Woolf uses anaphora in the beginning of her speech. Using the phrase “it is true” (1) to emphasize that she is a women that is employed. In the time period Woolf wrote this speech was during the 1930’s, which is mostly associated with the Women’s Suffrage movement. This meant that women back were expected by society to fit into a specific role. Woolf’s self-employment as a writer did not fit into the role of women of the 1930’s. Woolf makes an understatement mentioning that “It is true I am a woman” (1). This understatement was made in order for the reader to comprehend the significance of Woolf being a female during the era of the 1930’s. Woolf not only includes herself to be a recognized female writer but enumerates names of recognized writers such as Fanny Burney to Jane Austen. Stating that these exclusive writes are responsible for “cutting the rode” (1) for the future female authors. To make her point valid, Woolf implements imagery of how her “scratching of a pen” (1) does not negatively impact the “family peace” nor the “family purse” (1). In addition with the specific phrase “the cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason women have succeeded as writers before they succeeded in other professions” (1). This specific phrase adds a sense of irony of how something considered cheap can prosper with a work of a woman.

Today the equality between men and woman is closer then it ever has before in history, with women CEO’s and stay at home dads. This happened because of the strong woman in history fighting for the same rights as man, private property, creative freedom, and the power to use their intellect. Virginia Woolf is one of those ladies arguing that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She believes that women are locked in some sort of intellectual prison and not being able to have money or privacy keeps them locked, unable to blossom intellectually.

In his essay he claims that , “Lately, the raging debate about issues of “work-life balance” has focused on whether or not women can “have it all.” completely lost in this situation is the growing strain of work-life balance on men, who today are experiencing the demands of work and home same or more than women” (697). By saying this , Dorment explains that men are forced to do more things than women these days and that we should equally pay attention to both man and women. Men are required to work outside of home and help with chores and take care of kids at home. He points out that men are working more than ever before in the history and tells facts on how much more dominant women are in earning degrees and wealth.

Women are generally responsible for caregiving (children and elders), volunteer activities, domestic duties, and social reproduction at an average rate of 2:1 (50 hours per week) compared with men (25 hours per week), regardless of how much paid work they are committed to (Milan, Keown, & Urquijo, 2015). Men are freer to pursue paid opportunities (and investments in human capital) and women are restricted by unpaid obligations, which perpetuates inequity. Some solutions to gain equity include social welfare reform programs, universal/affordable dependents’ care programs, and the shift of unpaid duties to men, as sociologist Nancy Fraser (1997) theorizes in After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought

Woolf doesn't believe that a woman has shown who she is if she hasn't yet written anything to express herself. A woman could express herself based on the experiences you have been through. The fiction in a figurative sense forces her to think about her past. " But this freedom is only a beginning: the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished” (Woolf 247), it is shown that a room represents their property.. It allows you to reflect about who you truly are and it shows that it's only yours. Freedom isn't something common for women, so the freedom given within this room allows them to think and build up the "furniture" which is the fiction in writing, becoming an author

“The Second Shift” by Arlie Russell Hochschild sheds light on the fact that America is stuck in a perpetual loop, unable to change its societal gender expectations. Substantial progress has been made when it comes to women in the workplace, but that same progress is lacking when it comes to a woman’s work within the home. When looking at employed women the term “second shift” can be brought to the forefront. The expression “second shift” refers to the tasks done around the house after the initial work hours are through. Hochschild critiques how the American career system treats the “second shift”; she makes it clear that the working American society has yet to take the additional shift into consideration due to the already implemented

“The vast majority of Americans (79%) rejected the notion that women should return to their traditional role in society. Yet when they were asked what is best for young children, very few adults (16%) said that having a mother who works full time is the “ideal situation.” Some 42% said that having a mother who works part time is ideal and 33% said what’s best for young children is to have a mother who doesn’t work at all. Even among full-time working moms, only about

If someone were to walk up to you and ask if you “have it all,” you would probably look confused and answer with a question of your own: Have “what” all? Exactly! Richard Dorment rebukes Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” with his own piece of “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All.” While Slaughter believes that with “work-family” balance, women (and men too) can have it all, but not with the current structures of our society and economy, Dorment contends that no one can have it all. Whereas Slaughter focused mainly on women in her concept work-family balance, balancing their career time and family time with their children, Dorment shifts this concept to “dual-income” home, both parents

First, there are two roads: men and women. These roads run parallel for a considerable amount of time, until the woman has a child and her responsibilities automatically double. As she splits from the road of man, she sees the responsibility of providing for her family, but also providing for her child as a mother. Suddenly there is a fork in the woman’s road: the financial identities of women. Women who had a substantial amount of money were not plagued by the problems that women of a lower socioeconomic status faced every day. More affluent women had the option of “hiring household help and limiting market work to part time”, essentially granting them an ideal balance of ‘the double day’. The women on the other side of the economic spectrum “did not have the luxury of being part-time or secondary earners”. These women had to take into account that a portion of their salary would be funneled directly into the pocket of whoever takes care of their children while they are working. An examination of the intersections of gender and socioeconomic status

For the second short writing assignment, I had to read both the Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung and Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. While reading both books, I quickly found that I understand the argument made in the Second shift by Arlie Hochschild and I feel like I have been in Hochschilds shoes. I am a nanny so I see parents come home on a day to day basis after a long day of working. In this study, Arlie Hochschild observes dozens of families with children under the age of six. The parents are career driven and have dual-incomes to support the family they created. A lot of households have a stay at home mother, but in today’s society more women are either working full time or part time to help support the family.

Robert Dorment’s summary from his article talked about that women always complained about men did wrong but men who worked so hard for their family and work-life balance. Richard used that word “castigate” for men that means women scold men, but they did not realize men worked so hard. Other quote about the castigation of men, “…person whose husband, by her own admission, sacrificed much in his own academic career to do other heavy lifting with their children, all so she could pursue her dream job and then complain about it, bitterly, in the pages of a national magazine” (Dorment 708). Anne-Marie Slaughter explained that women who get promotion from other positions that they realized they do not have spent time with their family and some women who leave their jobs because of their family reasons. The quote said, “It is unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else” (Slaughter 682). Third article called Women, work and work/life balance: Research roundup talked about the wage inequality and unequal responsibilities between men and women. Women have more family responsibilities than men do because some women are staying at home while taking care of their kids. Last article, Work-Life Balance – An integrated Approach: The case for joint and several responsibility talked about the

In the quite hours of early morning my mother rises out of bed, as she has done every morning for the past twenty-two years. She quietly begins her long day by making tea and cooking breakfast. Before the day ends, my mother would have cooked several meals, cleaned several times and worked a full time job. My mother’s daily routine is not unique and has historically been done by women for centuries. Even today, women are supposed to do it all, have a family, and take care of the house/children and work full-time. Women who are in the workforce are unpaid and the work they do at home is viewed as inferior. They often deal with sexism and racism in the workplace. Changes in law and our thought process need to occur to create and an equitable system of work for all women.

Conventionally, females played a very insignificant role in the paid work force of a society as many times they were expected to be home taking care of their family. Their roles at home can often include grocery shopping, meeting all the needs of her children and husband. As time moved on, our society became more accepted of sharing housework between the couples, but even so, the traditionally more feminine housework such as cooking, caring for sick children, and shopping for the entire family are mostly done by the females of the house. It is argued in a research journal Work and Occupations (Witkowski & Leicht, 1995) that in an average North American family, females take on roughly three-quarters of the housework. Even though we are in a democratic society, parenting roles in the household are assigned based on gender rather than in a democratic fashion (Winslow-Bowe, 2009). Because of the many responsibilities and obligations that are associated with the female gender, their career paths are eventually affected for the worse. According to Statistics Canada (2001), for every dollar a man earns, a single woman earns 93 cents and a married woman earns 69 cents. These statistics

The narrator returns home disappointed that she hasn't found some piece of truth to explain the poverty that women don’t share with men. Woolf thinks she needs a historian to describe the conditions of women through history. Compared to men, woman’s lives seem non-existent. She describes fiction as being connected to life but as careful as a spider-web and, in