Gender Inequality In The Family

The family is viewed as an essential part of our society, it always has been and it always will be. Although the family as a unit is vital for the continuous running of our society it can no longer be known as a fixed category. The first definition of a family found online is “a group consisting of two parents and their children living together as a unit”. This is still the only way many people can view a family. Another that deviates from this particular image is seemingly wrong or incomplete. Families have been around since the beginning of time for the sole reason of procreation. People were reproducing in order to carry on the lineage and to carry on a name. the family is an ideal example of gender inequality. In the centuries that have

he explores sexual inequality down to its very base. Engels published his book, based around much of Marx’s notes, titled “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” in 1884, one year after the death of Karl Marx. According to Engels “with the patriarchal family, we enter the field of written history”. With the advancement of agriculture and the domestication of farm animals, moving society from the hunter-gatherer ways, properties were soon developed. Men wished to have a means of lineage, now that they had something substantial worth passing on to their sons, so men became the primary individuals in the home as their strength and mobility in caring for their land was ‘superior’ to that of their female counterparts. Women son became slaves in the home as the men took control of the home situation also, women were degraded and demeaned. She would “become the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children” (Engels, pp, 120). He claims that inside this due, the man represents the bourgeois while the woman represents the proletariat. Many societies have different forms of this but fundamentally they are all quite similar, the women are subject to men within the marriage and outside the marriage. Monogamy developed in more detail, primarily for women, after the development of private property and lineage. All this so the man can be certain that he is the father of a certain child of a certain woman. The idealised image of a women in the 19th and 20th century was as stay at home mother, who cooked, cleaned, care for the children and fawned over her husband, who went out to work daily. Things have gradually been changing since the late 20th century, women have been gaining more rights as the century carries on. They have fought for the right to vote, to be able to own land, and are continuing to fight for equal pay in the workplace.