13.4 Gender, Work, and Family
Elizabeth B. Pearce
Intertwined with the idealized nuclear family is the gendered work world, or separate spheres, in which men went to paid work, and women took care of the home, the children, and the man’s needs. But as we have discussed throughout this text, not only was this idealized family able to exist as a majority for a very short period of time, it also excluded many families. As we know, one of the ways that families have changed in the United States is directly related to the continued decline of the economy after its peak in the mid-1970s, which means that many more families need to have all the adults (whether one adult, two adults, or more) in any given household employed with paid work. In this section we will focus primarily on gender, because of its significant role in family ideals, but we will also touch on other social identities.
Occupational Segregation
The workplace has seen many changes in the last few hundred years. One of the first groups fighting for working women’s rights was the Daughters of Liberty, formed in 1765. (Sweet, 2021). In 1873, the Supreme Court ruled that women were prohibited from practicing law. The finding stated, “it was natural and proper for women to be excluded from the legal profession” as women were expected to fulfill “the duties of motherhood and wife” (Oyez, n.d.). Positive progress was made toward gender equality in the workplace with the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963. It stated that companies could not pay people differently for the same work based on gender.
More recently, in 2013, the U.S. military allowed women to serve in previously closed combat designations. 2022 saw the first female aircraft carrier captain in the history of the U.S. Navy, Captain Amy Bauernschmidt, shown in figure 13.14. When Captain Bauernschmidt started her career at the U.S. Naval Academy in the early 1990s, women were prohibited from serving on combat ships (Lendon et al., 2022). Additionally, transgender people have been allowed to openly serve in the U.S. military as of 2016.
In Focus: Military Workplace Policies and Family Formation
The branches of the military, which include the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard, are funded by the federal government. As an employer, the federal government has particular policies that apply to families. Two of the most well-known apply to relationships, sexuality and marriage.
For the majority of this nation’s military history, members of the LGBTQIA+ community have been disqualified from employment and service. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t serve, but they were stigmatized and hidden. The policy changed between 1994 and 2011, when the infamous rule “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) was in effect. During this time, gay men, lesbian women, and bisexual people were permitted to be employed as long as they did not exhibit or talk about conduct that could be identified in these ways; in addit