Are Women the Main Enforcers of Our Gender Roles?

"According to Israeli Utopian theory, the burden of child-rearing and home-making was the root cause of sex-role differentiation and female inequality. Therefore radical changes in family structure were instituted. Traditional marriage was replaced by a system of cohabitation in which a man and woman were assigned shared sleeping accommodation within the commune but retained their separate names and identities. The children were removed from special contact with their parents and reared with others of the same age in community-run nurseries where they played, ate, slept and were educated. Adults were supposed to think of all the kibbutz children as joint social property and were discouraged from developing particularly close relationships with their own offspring.

Thus freed from the 'domestic yoke', women were expected to engage in agricultural and productive work to the same extent as men, and men were likewise expected to share in traditional female work. Classically feminine clothes, cosmetics, jewellery and hair-styles were rejected. In order to be equals of men, it was thought women would have to look like men as well as share traditionally male roles.

When anthropologists Melford and Audrey Spiro examined the achievements of the kibbutzim in 1950, the experiment appeared to have been largely successful and their preconception of human nature as 'culturally relative' was held to be confirmed. However, in 1975 Melford Spiro returned to the kibbutz for a follow-up study and was surprised to discover that in the intervening quarter-century striking changes had occurred in the domain of marriage, family and sex-roles which 'all but undid the earlier revolution' (Spiro, 1979). The younger generation of women, although raised with unisex models (women driving tractors and men in domestic service occupations) and taught from early childhood that men and women are the same in nature, were now pressing to be allowed fulfilment in the role of mother. 'Women's rights' had taken on almost exactly the reverse meaning to that in our society."

Rest here – very interesting – http://www.heretical.com/wilson/rkibbutz.html

The social creationists paint a picture of women being forced into these roles by the feminist caricature of what men are, dim witted, oppressive, illogical and obsessed with power and control over women, have they got it all wrong?

Suggestion:

I was under the impression you weren't supporter of socially conditioned gender roles?

The answer to your initial question is 'no'

Right wing conservatives, MRAs etc are the ones who believe gender roles are innate (which is not the case as has clearly been shown)

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Yes they are completely wrong.

Was it not for those dim witted, oppressive, illogical and power-obsessed males, women would have been out there hunting and fighting and men would have been home minding the children.

But we still haven't figured out how those males managed to keep women in their place for so long in view of how equal men and women are.

cuz we am superiorous but equal.

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