Discuss the following quotation from Parsons “…serves to concentrate the judgment and valuation of men on their occupational achievements, while the valuation of women is diverted into realms outside the occupationally relevant sphere.” Explain how the quote fits into the larger argument Parsons is proposing.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In the 1970s Sex Roles in the American Kinship System came to epitomize Parsons’s conservatism, interpreted as it was as an explicit endorsement by Parsons of traditional gender roles and the dire consequences that would ensue should they be breeched. Feminists were particularly incensed by Parsons’s assertion that “many women succumb to . . . dependency cravings through such channels as neurotic illness or compulsive domesticity” which leads them to “abdicate both their responsibilities and their opportunities for genuine independence” (1943:194). In addition, they found Parsons’s assumption that “surely the pattern of romantic love which makes his relation to the ‘woman he loves’ the most important single thing in a man’s life, is incompatible with the view that she is an inferior creature, fit only for dependency on him” especially naïve. Yet, interestingly, read in the context of the twenty-first century, one can see that in some respects Parsons got a “bad rap” for this essay. Although there is no question that his description of the ideal, typical, white middle-class family is told from an upper-middle-class white male’s point of view, in fact, Parsons did capture important elements of this system. For instance, certainly his assertion that this traditional role structure “serves to concentrate the judgment and valuation of men on their occupational achievements, while the valuation of women is diverted into realms outside the occupationally relevant sphere” rings true. Indeed, one can even read this statement as an indictment of the traditional kinship system because of its demeaning effect on women. Parsons’s most pivotal premise, however—that changes that are functional for one part of the system (e.g., the benefits to women and society as women enter the paid workforce) will produce changes that are not necessarily functional for other parts of the system (e.g., the schools, which relied on the free labor of female “volunteers” for essential tasks—is not necessarily sexist at all, in the sense that what is sexist is the assumption (prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s) that women could enter the workforce without significant changes being made to other social structures and systems (e.g., families, schools, the workplace) and, at the least, without a major increase in quality day-care and child-care facilities.