Marxist Analysis On Cornflakes

We can illustrate this through numerous examples around us, the profound one being that of the television commercials that we come across in our daily lives. The advertisements of cornflakes and children’s health drinks always represent the mother as the caregiver whose sole responsibility is to ensure that her child gets the daily dose of the health drink/cornflakes that is being endorsed through the commercial. Also, worth noticing is the fact that most of these advertisements either relegate the father to the background or function completely without his presence thus assigning the role of fulfilling the dietary and other health needs of children exclusively to the mother. However, Marxist Feminist critic Nancy Hartsock explains that subverting

Mothering is the only role in which the discretion of the woman is taken into consideration by patriarchy. It is also the only space where she is granted autonomy to monitor and regulate another individual, the infant, irrespective of its sex. However, this suggestion discounts the scope for any egalitarianism with respect to the roles to be performed by both the sexes respectively both in the professional front as well as in the familial. In the contemporary times, it seems quite apparent that women have actively assumed agency of the course of their lives, are in a position to exercise sovereignty over themselves and even other individuals, including the men in their lives and solely rely on their own discretion to govern their living, however, as Cameron Macdonald in her essay ‘What’s Culture Got to Do with It? Mothering Ideologies as Barriers to Gender Equity’ points out that even in the Western societies which are considered comparatively progressive with regard to honouring the independence of women both in the realm of the domestic as well as in the public sphere, “Today although 70 percent of US mothers work outside the home, prevailing beliefs about childrearing are…firmly based on the ideal of the ever-present, continually attentive, at-home mother” (P. 414). This is a result of a sexist indoctrination in the understanding of gender roles that women go through. However, more disturbing is their complicity to the defined parameters within which women have been taught to function. A toddler’s needs being