Telling Women's Lives

Unfinished Business- Matthew Fernandez

In Unfinished Business, Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that it is necessary that we have social change. I enjoyed reading Unfinished Business because we have already discussed and learned many issues dealing with gender inequality, but this book gave me a greater understanding that it is necessary for men and women to share equally. This is achieved by caring for others, which allows for men and women to live the life that they want. Slaughter gives us an outline on how “caregiving” could help to shift out culture norms. This idea is about investing in others rather than investing in ourselves and goes hand in hand with breadwinning. We have been taught that men are the ones that need to be the breadwinners. Slaughter explains that there are many women at the bottom of the economic ladder that are both the caregiver and the breadwinner. On the first page of chapter 6, Slaughter says “real equality for men and women needs a men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women”. In order to fix this inequality, men need to feel that they have the same range of choices to combine caregiving and breadwinning. We have looked at some examples that women are the ones that need to change, but Slaughter believes that a men’s movement is very important. The assumption that men are masculine and the only way to show that is to provide for a family through money, needs to be challenged. Once we acknowledge that providing for a family through time invested is masculine, we can alleviate the social pressures for both men and women. I think that this movement could truly make head way on this issue.