Telling Women's Lives

Gormley: “Unfinished Business” Reader Response

One Issue raised in Unfinished Business that I found interesting was in part 2, chapter 6: “The next phase of the Women’s movement is a men’s movement.” I found this to be particularly interesting because I had never thought about the pro-feminism movement in regards to boys. It seems valid to point out that boys are generally not being brought up with the same amount of encouragement for different future life roles as women are. Where girls are now, increasingly, being brought up in a world where they are encouraged to do whatever it is they want to do, whether it be a stay at home mom or an engineer, boys are still being brought up under only masculine values for the most part. This section of the book pointed out that for equality to be achieved, boys and girls alike should be brought up with the same set of universal encouragement so that when these boys grow into adult men, they don’t hinder the progress of women by feeling as though they need to be the one that has a high paying and important job, even if they would rather be spending more time with their families. This cultural norm makes it harder for women to advance professionally if the men in their life have beliefs that they have to have a more important job and earn more money than their wives. If there was a cultural shift in which both boys and girls were brought up believing that having a big time corporate job or being an excellent stay at home parent are equally important, I think men and women would both be left in happier positions in which they can both serve the role they would prefer without any internal feelings if shortcoming and without any external societal pressures of the different roles in which men and women “should” serve.