The Representation of gender roles and marriage - Research Paper Example

?RUNNING HEAD: REPRESENTATION OF GENDER ROLE IN MARRIAGE Representation of Gender Role in Marriage of the of the Representation of Gender Role in Marriage The process of `giving voice' is what want to focus on here. It is one that is very relevant to an international gathering in which different `mother tongues'-and I should add `father tongues'-will be used to communicate about the theme of the conference. We stand to gain a lot from the endeavour to communicate across cultures, although no doubt much will be lost in the process; and some may have strong feelings about the tyranny of having to communicate in an alien language. For language, as well as being a vehicle for communication, is also power. The author and psychoanalyst Eva Hoffman, who left her native Poland to complete her education in Canada and the USA, and who now practices as a psychoanalyst in London, writes about the relationship between language and identity in her autobiography Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language: I was also delighted to be asked to speak at a conference marking the 60th anniversary of the host organization, Relate. My association with Relate goes back even further than that with the Commission, and I am a firm admirer of the contribution it makes nationally to trying to improve communication between women and men through its work with troubled marriages. Talk therapy does offer the chance of finding one's voice, discovering a new language in which difficult matters can be talked about, and repossessing one's identity. Relate may not have thought of itself as a language school, but it is in the business of offering interpretive services. In that, it shares an enterprise with the work of my own organization, the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute, which also celebrated an important occasion in 1998-its 50th anniversary. Both organizations are concerned with whether and how women and men talk to each other. Not far from where I live in Hertfordshire is the village of Ayot St Lawrence. One of this little village's claims to fame is that the playwright George Bernard Shaw used to live there. His best-known play is probably Pygmalion, a quintessentially English drama about the divisions of class and gender, and one made popular by the musical My Fair Lady. The plot revolves around a bet, made by a dialectician, Professor Henry Higgins, that he can train a market girl, Eliza Dolittle, to speak and act in ways that would allow her to be passed off as aristocracy. In trying to eliminate the linguistic indicators of class, Higgins becomes increasingly frustrated by the differences of gender that he encounters. One plaintive, immortalized line from the musical, pleads `Why can't a woman be more like a man?'. The boot today is on the other foot. When it comes to communication, the exasperated cry is now `Why can't a man be more like a woman?'. You hear it in the consulting rooms of counsellors and therapists, in research reports on family life, and in media discussions on gender relations. The questions now are `why do men stonewall?', `why can't they talk about their feelings?', `why are they so orientated towards activities?' In an age where companionability is the primary expectation of marriage and partnership, men tend to get the blame for not delivering. Their 'failure' to communicate is taken as a key reason why marriages break down. They are no longer needed to bring home the bacon, nor even to provide the socially accepted framework of marriage for conceiving and raising children, and women are asking themselves what they need men for. Men, on the other hand, are facing a decline in their market, social and biological value. As if to underline the point, sperm levels are falling in our increasingly oestrogen-ridden environment, and even male delivery systems have proved inferior (at least, in terms of efficiency) to those carried out in the hospital laboratory. The recent explosion of interest in the male potency drug, Viagra, tells its own story. Is this story just of `Boy's Own' interest or is it truly cosmopolitan? Men are becoming increasingly and uncomfortably aware of what we need women for. The 1980s was the decade in which research presented men with the finding that, whereas they tend to describe their wives as their best friends, their wives apply this description to other women. It was also the decade in which divorce highlighted how much men relied upon women to maintain the threads of connection with family and friends. The 1990s has shown the British film industry at its most potent depicting a group of redundant and demoralized steelworkers recovering self-esteem through exposing-to a sea of female faces-that part of their anatomy most associated with their virility and vulnerability. Even Australia has shaken the bastion of male values with its documentary on male prostitution. How the `times they are a changing'-even in relation to the oldest profession! Susie Orbach (2004), co-founder of the Women's Therapy Centre in this country and New York, and an established writer on feminist issues, comments on the unconscious gender contract that has operated historically between women and men, a contract that has become embedded in Western social culture. Behind the traditional demarcation of roles in marriage-man as provider, woman as homemaker-lies a less explicit and still pervasive assumption about how intimacy is to be managed. The need to be intimately involved with others is universal, as is the fear this need generates in us because of its power to expose our vulnerability and threaten our independence. The conflict between intimacy and independence, central to every marriage and partnership, has been managed by women carrying the denied dependency needs of men, and men carrying the denied independence of women. This arrangement, argues Orbach, stems directly from our social arrangement whereby women take primary, and sometimes exclusive, responsibility for raising children. Such a practice, as other writers have commented, has significant implications for child development and subsequent adult life. Mothers become the focal point of intensely felt needs, and ambivalent emotions generated by the frustration of those needs, for infants and young children whether male or female. Girls, sharing the same gender as their mothers, learn the skills of emotional relatedness, and tend to deal with unmet dependency needs by caring for others. Their identity is founded on 'sameness'. Desiring the 'otherness' of father may generate anxiety about rivalling mother and so that desire may be damped down. As Hudson & Jacot (1995) have argued: Where heterosexual desire in the male promises a magical return to a state of primitive intimacy and connectedness, in the female it brings with it an incubus of identity-threatening anger and fathomless gloom. While boys and girls are symbiotically connected with their mother, she is regarded as 'same' while father is regarded as 'different'. As male gender identity crystallizes (whether as a result of biological or social processes) boys will experience a reversal in what is regarded as 'same'. Mother moves from this position to becoming 'different' for boys, as they relinquish their fusion with her to cross the gender divide and identify with father, a process that has been described as the `male wound' (Hudson & Jacot, 2004). Conversely, what was regarded as 'different' (father) becomes 'same'. In joining the male world, one that is often associated with absence and activity, boys make a gender crossing that is not required of girls. The developmental trajectories of boys and girls, it is argued, then become different. The costs of the 'wound' for boys can be recorded in later life in terms of personal insensitivity and competition; the benefits in terms of a sense of agency and abstract passions: men have a capacity to relate to things as people and people as things, and to displace private passions into public activities. The costs of the absence of the 'wound' for women is a tendency to promote the interests of others before those of themselves, even to live vicariously; the benefits in terms of social connectedness and co-operation. But, so the argument runs, there is nothing intrinsic about men and women that make this kind of adaptation the exclusive province of either gender. Orbach argues that contemporary marriage can drive couples mad by trying to foster an illusion that women and men occupy the same space, see things in the same way, speak the same language and share the same aspirations in a world that is deeply divided by gender. Traditional gender-based assumptions about who does the emotional work in families, and attends to the ties of kith and kin, ensure that the old contract is perpetuated in which women protect men from owning their need to be looked after and their capacity to care, while men protect women from owning their competence to achieve without compromising their entitlement to be cared for. While traditional marriage structures the dynamics of dependency in ways that can stifle the development of women and men, modern aspirations may equally frustrate that development by denying that differences really do exist between them. Either way, we can understand some of the afflictions of contemporary marriage in terms of the pressure on this unconscious gender contract to change. The issue is every bit as much a private as a public matter. For example, a couple think quite differently about the best way to manage change. She wants him to listen to the way she feels, and for him to disclose the way he feels. She looks back on things they have not managed happily between them, and wants them to review together what has happened in the past in order to create a more secure basis for working together in the future. His experience is that talking can often make things worse rather than better, and that it is more constructive to plan how they will manage things differently in the future than to dwell on what has happened in the past. Recently the wife mentioned that they had sold their boat, and that it had taken a week to do so. The husband, sensing criticism, remarked that the sale had gone through very quickly. I asked what the boat had meant for them. The wife's eyes filled with tears as she described the family holidays they had enjoyed afloat when the children were young, and how much she would miss it. He assured her that they had done the right thing, and reminded her that they had agreed to sell the boat as they hardly used it any more. "I don't disagree with you", she said, "but what do you feel about it?". He became silent. I asked what he thought about his wife's reaction to the sale. He said he was surprised. They hadn't talked about the emotional side of it, and he thought her reaction was a bit excessive. He also felt aggrieved that she seemed to be withdrawing her support for something they had agreed upon. I asked what he would miss most about the boat. He said that, although family holidays were times when the family had been more together, he felt more relief than loss about the sale. She said she couldn't believe that he didn't feel as sad as she did about losing the boat, to which he replied: "nevertheless, that is the case". This exchange took place in a climate of latent reproach and criticism, as if each was having to defend themselves against the other. The wife felt that she was having to defend the validity of feeling sad, even though she had agreed that selling the boat was the right thing to do. The husband felt she was going back on what they had agreed, and that he was under pressure to feel and talk about the experience in the same way as she did, which was not his style. References AINSWORTH, M. et al.(2006) Patterns of Attachment Assessed in the Strange Situation and at Home (Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum). BARTHOLOMEW, K. & HOROWITZ, L. (2007) Attachment styles among young adults: a test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, pp. 226-244. CLULOW, C. (2006) `Equality in the family: anticipating the consequences', unpublished report of the Commission on Marriage and Interpersonal Relations of the International Union of Family Organisations. HOFFMAN, E. (2001) Lost in Translation. Life in a New Language (London, Minerva). HUDSON, L. & JACOT, B. (2004) The Way Men Think: Intellect, Intimacy and the Erotic Imagination (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press). HUDSON, L. & JACOT, B. (2007) Intimate Relations. The Natural History of Desire (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press). ORBACH, S.(2004) A woman's place?, in C. CLULOW (Ed.) Women, Men and Marriage, pp. 106-116 (London, Sheldon). MAIN, M. et al. (2006) Security in infancy, childhood and adulthood. A move to the level of representation, in: I. BRETHERTON & E. WATERS, Growing Points in Attachment Theory and Research. Monograph for the Society for Research in Child Development, 50, pp. 66-104 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). TANNEN, D. (2007) You Just Don't Understand. Women and Men in Conversation (New York, William Morrow). Read More