Gender Inequality By Social Class
In the last 50 years we have experienced great changes toward gender equality in America. With the feminist movement of the 1960s, women began to enter the workforce in great numbers. Women had also had high labor market participation during World War II as so many male soldiers were away, women had to take up jobs to support their family and keep their local economy on track. Many of these women dropped right back out of the labor force when the men returned home from war to raise children born in the generation of the baby boomers. In the late 1960s when women began entering the labor force in record numbers, they were entering in addition to all of the men, as opposed to substituting for men during the war. This dynamic shift from the one-earner household to the two-earner household dramatically changed the socioeconomic class system of this country.
Read more about this topic: Women In The Workforce
Famous quotes containing the words gender, inequality, social and/or class:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if the highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display, luxuriousness, and idle, the same spirit will prevail in humbler life.”
—First published in Girls’ Home Companion (1895)