Monday, March 26, 2007

Motherhood

1. According to Hays, in the Middle Ages, adults believe that children are demonic, animalistic, ill-formed and physically fragile. It is believed that “if they are left to their own devices, these demonic creatures would harm not only others by also themselves”. Therefore, adults during that time period did not do restrain them with anything, tight clothes, for example; and this will allow the children to grow properly. Adults also “administer[ed] opium to troublesome children and treatment through alchemy.”

In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a change in the notion of appropriate mothering. During this period, the “innocence” of children emerged in a small segment of the population. The words “mama” and “papa” were more commonly used; mothers began breast-feeding their children; reputable people began boasting about their domestic virtues on their graves; and no more swaddling clothes. The children were also more protected from the “real world” and avoid them from becoming corrupted by removing servants from their homes. However, this change only happened in Europe, but not in New England. The people in New England believed that children should be molded by physical punishments, religious instructions and participation in work life and the goal is to “overcome the ‘sin nature’ of the child.” Mothers were guided by the Bible for childrearing.

Childrearing changed dramatically toward the end of the 19th century. A mother has to be scientifically trained; her instincts, virtues and affection were no longer adequate for the upbringing of a child. Mothers not only have to be a good role model, but they have to be able to “keep abreast of the latest information on child development and to practice the methods experts suggested.” This led to an “era of strict scheduling, regularity, and letting the child ‘cry out loud’ than calming him with affectionate nurture.”

The last stage took place throughout the 19th century and early 20th centuries. Mothers emphasized the following: center around the good of the family and the good of the nation; “imprinting adult sensibilities on children from th emoment of birth; and the making of a proper adult that was understood as the basis for training the child.” This was known as the “permissive era” and was strongly believed that “the natural development of the child and the fulfillment of children’s desires are ends in themselevs and should be the fundamental basis of childrearing practices.”

2. The role of motherhood has traditionally been considered immateral and is equated with “doing nothing.” Many women can not work when they decided to become stay-home mothers and it becomes a handicap when they decide to look for a job later in life. The economists believe that the time mothers spent with their children is wasted; they do not believe that the skills required to raise a human being, the development of human character as well as the instillation of the desire and ability to learn are of any value.

Once women have children, they have no choice but to cut back on or to quit their jobs at inflexible workplaces. Additionally, marriage is stll not an equal financial partnership where in most families, “family income belongs soley to ‘he who earns it.” Therefore, if there is a divorce, the spouse who stayed home will be worse off financially than the spouse who devoted its life to a career. Lastly, “government social polices don’t even define unpaid care of family dependents as work.” For example, they can’t earn Social Security programs, but nannies do. As a result, motherhood is not very attractive, especially in the United States and is the “single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age.”

I believe that it takes a lot for a woman to drop her career and become a stay-home mother. Society seems to not favor this way, but I believe that it’s really a personal choice for the women. I personally would never want to become a stay-home mother; I would work less but not totally abandon my career. I guess as a woman who is college-educated, I’ve been taught and told many times that women should have their own careers. I also believe that women went through nine months of pain to give birth already, men should try to help out with caring the child. I believe that men and women should take care of the child equally and not have one spouse bear all the responsibility.

3. According to Collins, there are two types of mothering, which are the controlling type and the expressing type. The first type includes images of matriah, mammy and the welfare mother and they struggle to be good mothers. These mothers do not enjoy motherhood, because they find it burdensome, it stifles creativity, it exploits their labor and “makes them partners in their own oppression.” The latter type includes the mothers who can “express and learn the power of self-reliance, the importance of valuing and respecting ourselves, the necessity of self-reliance and independence, and a belief in Black women’s empowerment.” They believe that motherhood gave them self-actualization, status in the Black community and a catalyst for social activism.

4. Women as well as men oftentimes admit that they do not believe that bearing children while poor and unmarried is the ideal thing to do. Most women prefer to have children after they graduate from school and secure a job. However, most do not follow this ideal path due to their limited economic perspective – “the poor have little motivation to time their births as precisely as their middle-class counterparts do.” This segment of the population highly anticipates the coming of new children and do not regret their pregnancies at all. In fact, they believe that their children “saved” them and before their arrivals, their lives were out-of-control, having numerous fights with their families and peers. Most mothers become more responsible after the births of their children because they gave them “a compelling sense of purpose.” Additionally, around the birth of children, most parents shape their lives up for the sake of their children and they believe that they will eventually get married. However, very few couples actually marry. Poor women do not reject the notion of marriage, but they adore this notion because they believe that divorce is the worst thing that can happen to them, even worse than having a baby outside of marriage. Most poor women regain a sense of purpose even after the ill-timing of the births and became more responsible.

I believe that mothers who claim the births of the babies gave them a purpose to life and became more responsible are the worst mothers there can be. Why do they need a baby to tell them that they need to change the lifestyles they have right now? Why can’t they shape up themselves? Don’t they know that the babies deserve more and they are bringing them into a world that they made no efforts to improve? They just began another vicious cycle of pregnancy births and their babies will probably end up like their parents. I believe that parents who do not attempt to improve their lives will not be good parents. Many poor people blame the government, schools, and other people for their economic situations but it doesn’t seem like they even attempted to try to improve their situations. Most of them probably had the opportunity to graduate from school, go to college and find a job where they will earn more than a job if they don’t graduate from school.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The American System

1. Midwives and physicians view births differently; midwives believe that births should be natural biological processes, requiring some support but very few interventions, whereas some believe that physicians believe that pregnancies and births that require specialized care and something that requires technological cures. Many women prefer to have control over their own bodies when giving birth. Therefore, they prefer to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife because they believe that this is a relatively natural process and a midwife is sufficient by offering them “exhaustive prenatal care and overall maternal health screening, avoidance of unnecessary medical interventions, important reduction in anxiety, and mutual trust between themselves and their clients. I personally prefer to give birth at the hospitals due to the fact that I believe that doctors are the more proper personnel to aid the birth process. I believe that it should be a natural process as well and midwives have supported this process for centuries. However, I have watched too much television and know that there can be many complications to the birth process. Therefore, I prefer to be safe and go to a hospital to have my children.

2. The law has changed the ties between parents and children over time. There have been long-term trends toward the emancipation of the child from its father and from the family in general. The law has protected children from abusive or neglectful parents and would take away children from bad parents and give them away to good parents. In essence, even though children are supposed to be under the supervision of its parents, they have legal rights and the state enforces these laws if they are too young to do it themselves. Due to these protective laws, the authority of family is becoming weaker and weaker in comparison to the past but it is still extremely strong. Adoption has become a very popular means to get rid of the children parents do not want or do not have the resources to raise the children as well as a mean for parents to have the children that they have always wanted. However, adoption also has a dark side to it, where the ideals of adoption were ruined and one side does not get what they want. Children are abused by its foster parents and some get kidnapped so that the parents who desperately want children can fill their void in their hearts. The court always tries to decide what the best interests of the child would be, but this is such a subjective way to decide. However, there can never be a systematic way to decide.

3. There has been controversy about the welfare system for many years. The conservative side believes that the recipients of welfare “are lazy, promiscuous, and pathologically dependent” and that the welfare system does not decrease poverty; in fact, it promotes laziness and single parenting as well as providing incentives for family dysfunctions and nonwork. The liberal side, on the other hand, believes that there should be emphasis on “the value orientation of the welfare system and the welfare poor overhauled” and that the welfare system should provide better economic support for the poor. In 1935, women, who were believed to be not worthy to have family ideal, were denied of aid. In the late 1960s, women who received aid in order to stay at home to care for the family, “just as the ideal of appropriate family life prescribed.” Additionally, the state government has been providing less and less aid to families in order to make welfare less attractive. It wanted women to get training and go to work and welfare was only given if the families met stringent conditions.

The reform of 1996 resulted with a nation “that longer beloved that women and children deserved any special form of protection.” Many still believed that children deserved some type of protection, for they are too young to be self-sustainable. This reform encouraged women to be less dependent on men and go out to look for work to support themselves. It served as a form of success for the women who have been fighting for women rights for quite some time. On the other hand, it also promoted the importance of responsible parents as an integral part of child-rearing and the well-being of the children. I believe that there are many families who deserve welfare but it does promote certain families to be lazy. It is very hard to set the rules to determine which family deserves welfare and which don’t. Every situation is different. This debate has led questions concerning independence and dependency, the responsibility of parents, community ties, family ties, and much, much more.

4. There will always be poverty around the world but there are two main reasons for the poverty gap in the United States. First, many powerful groups in the US believe that welfare does not help the poverty gap because it promotes people to be lazy, weak and dependent. Secondly, due to inadequate welfare, families who are unable to be self-sustaining are forced to find other means to support their families, which includes ones that break the law. Many families came to the United States and have probably heard of the “American Dream.” However, this dream became be harder to attain than before. The price of this dream has risen so sharply that many families are unable to reach this goal with their current salaries and wages. These costs include health care, higher education, high-quality child care, and housing. These aren’t even luxuries; they are merely “indispensable ingredients of the dream.” Solutions to make this dream more accessible include accelerated movement toward universal health insurance, universal availability of quality child care and preschool programs, movement to help students meet the requirements for higher education as well as creating public-private partnerships to expand the supply of affordable housing for the poor and the work-class families. Additionally, new policies to help the poor directly are needed, which includes minimum wages and creating a stable income floor for all poor families to ensure that no children are living under poor conditions. Efforts should be aimed so that every single person in the United States has unlimited opportunities to achieve the American Dream.

5. Clawson and Gerstel provided a comparison between the child care system in the United States and some European countries. Most parents in the US struggle to find child care, which led them to endure long waiting lists and have to frequently change locations. As a result, Clawson and Gerstel suggest that “the programs would be publicly funded and universal, available to all, either at no cost or at modest cost with subsidies for low-income participants.” The people who run these kinds of programs would be paid about the same as public school teachers. The length of each day will cover at least as many hours as the school day, while the “wrap-around” care would be available before and after this time. Not everyone has to participate in this program; admissions to these programs are completely voluntary, but “the programs would be such high quality that a majority of the children would enroll.” Additionally, “parents would be universally offered a significant period of paid paternal leave.” These programs will be extremely expensive, but it is believed that the costs of not caring about these children in the short-term or long-term prove to be far more expensive.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Violence Against Women

#1

Felson examined the gender perspective and the violence perspective in her article. The motivations of men who assault women are not sexists, but criminals. Also, violence against women is much more frequent when women have lower status and the rates of violence against men and women are comparable. However, Felson surprised me with the point that no matter where, men are much more likely to be victims of violence than are women. However, men are eight times more likely to commit violence against men. Felson concluded that sexism is one of the several reasons that may lead to violence against women, but this remains as an untested hypothesis. Also, much evidence points toward the theory of men raping women due to sexual motivations as well as the theory of men treating women as sexual objects.

I believe that the society tend to sympathize with female victims more than male victims due to the fact that female lack the physical power to defend themselves. I also believe that woman are more demanding in relationships and probably use violent force as much as men, but I don’t think that the degree of abuse against men will be as severe as the abuse done on women.

#2

Jones used a very powerful example to illustrate her point about why battered women don’t leave. She talked about Karen Straw who was repeatedly harassed, battened, and raped by her husband. Straw wanted to file divorce but couldn’t afford it; she moved to a welfare hotel with her two children, but the husband still found her and did the same things to her. One night she finally stopped it all when she got hold a kitchen knife and stabbed him. She was up for trial for murder. Jones wanted to illustrate how it has been unfair to battered women and what they had to put up with all this time. Battered women are not sufficiently protected by law and they continue to suffer this kind of treatment despite of what they do. Many women don’t leave because of dependence on the men, the feeling of helplessness, low self-esteem, masochism and psychological.

Women who are battered suffer the most unimaginable. They thought they married the loves of their lives but they did not have a clue that the men they thought they would spend the rest of their lives with would abuse them in this manner. Over time, it is not surprising to find these women to lose confidence in themselves, don’t know what to do anymore and feel dependent on their violent husbands.

I think that many women don’t leave because they believe that they need men in their lives and are dependent on them. They simply don’t know where to go or what to do. For the women who do leave, I believe that men will try to find them. I watched this movie by Jennifer Lopez about her and her child getting abused. She tried leaving with her daughter, but the husband found her and abused her. The police wasn’t able to do much.

#3

Ptacek provided some explanations for batterers which he classified as denials and justifications. The most common excuse is their acts are due to a loss of control influenced either from alcohol or drug use or from a buildup of frustrations. Another common excuse is blaming the victim, claiming that they were provoked by the women and denying the responsibility of their actions. Those who use this excuse claim that they are most commonly provoked by the woman’s verbal aggressiveness. On the other hand, there are two main groups of justifications. First is denial of injury, where batterers try to make their actions more neutral by denying or minimizing the injuries they have caused on the victims. The second type of justifications is where men find some type of fault in women and that becomes the reason for the battering.

From the justifications and denials provided by batterers, it seems like men do not want to take responsibility for their faults. They either deny it one or the other or they try to find ways to lessen the damage they have done on their victims.

Ptacek’s findings mentioned both the gender and violence issue in her article. It seemed like both gender and violence are reasons for battering. Men seem to hold the traditional view where they must be the dominant ones in the relationship and by battering the woman demonstrates their power in the relationship. On the contrary, men blame women for their frustration and violence is the result of their frustration, which became the reason why women were assaulted.