How Do Gender Roles Affect Motherhood?

While the family unit is constructed with a façade that says affect is the most important reason for starting a family, family structure and parenting are heavily influenced by capitalism and labor. Gender roles have influenced what roles men and women take in maintaining the family unit, and capitalism explains how they are able to do so. While men have traditionally been the head of the household and in charge of instilling morals and social expectations in their children, their role as such has shifted to a symbolic dominance. Mothers, in actuality, primarily maintain the family as they are saddled with most of the domestic, emotional, and child rearing labor.
In early hunter-gatherer societies, the “division of labor is based only on sex …show more content…
In the ideal construction of the modern parent, the father acts as the sole breadwinner, while the mother stays home and maintains the household and cares for the children. The majority of families, rather, have both the mother and father supporting the family financially, as financial strains leave “women in less advantaged households… no choice but to simultaneously be workers and mothers” (Coltrane, 2011). The shift towards an industrial economy, and now an intellectual economy, primarily affects motherhood, widening the gap between the ways upper class and poor women raise their children. Today, “for many, the workday has grown longer” and “the majority of American women are now in paid work” (Hochschild, 2011). As women are responsible for both earning a living and taking care of the family, yet are left with less and less time to care for children, those who can pay for it are outsourcing their ‘mothering’ labor. This forces many women of color to leave their children at home in order to earn a living caring for the children of upper class white women. As long as the work of mothering gets done, it does not matter who is doing the