Marriage: Better for Men or Women - Essay Example

Married men are better off than married women when it comes to satisfaction, health, and work. in today's society.  While society has redefined gender roles today, other gender stereotypes remain.  Married women are supposed to keep up traditional roles like housework, childcare, bearing children, and generally overseeing a household, but they must also take on a man's role and have a career too.  Men are not expected by society to pick up new duties.  A man's role and responsibilities have remained stagnant for a while.  Married men definitely have it better.

Women have come a long way, except when it comes to marriage.  To begin with, not all married men are better off, only because humans can never be classified in one way or another definitively.  However, most men do get a better life in marriage than women.  First, one must look at traditional chores men and women have in a marriage.  In a traditional marriage of a century ago, a man worked and a woman kept the house.  Men's chores around the house consisted of fixing leaking sinks, taking out the garbage, and mowing the lawn once a week in the summertime.  Women cleaned the house, gave birth, and took care of the children.  Now women clean the house, give birth, take care of children, mow the law, and have a career.  Men still take out garbage and mow the law, if they feel like it.  Since women can do it all, if the lawn doesn't get mowed, they will do it.  This is what becoming equal to men has gotten women, less respect and more responsibilities.  Some men help divide the household chores 50/50, but that is rare.  The result is “great frustration in trying to balance wage-work responsibilities and the demands of housework and motherhood"(Lancaster, 120).  This is the first reason married men have it better than married women.

Even if a married man is not employed, he rarely takes on the responsibility of a household like a woman.  One author reports, "interviews was that women still had major responsibility for housework and child-care - even where husbands were unemployed” (Dryden, 17).  The traditional roles of marriage still remain, despite the reversal of roles in a marriage.  The responsibilities of the household still fall on the married women.  Men consider cleaning, doing dishes, and changing babies as women's work.  This gives them an out on household duties.  Yet another reason married men have it better than married women.

Beyond housework and chores, married women will always bear the children.  Married men take for granted their wives' reproductive responsibilities.  In fact, some married men resent their wives having children and the attention their wives devote to the children.  One writer explains, “the fact that they had been unable to give their husbands quite so much attention after the birth of their babies than when the couple were without children"(Dryden, 62).  Married women must pay enough attention to their husbands, take care of their children, plus the other household duties.  Married men get a better deal than married women when it comes to having and rearing children.

The reason men have it better than women in marriage is simple.  Women without careers, that are homemakers have been labeled by today's generation as lazy.  The myth of a woman having it all including a family, children, and a career is perpetrated by the media toward married women.  What has been forgotten is the work it takes to run a household with children.  Not all feminists believe that homemakers are weak.  One report states, “A feminist movement that respected the achievements of women in the past would not disparage housework, motherhood, or unpaid civic and neighborly services" (Lasch, 119).  If taking care of a home would be regarded as equal to a job, maybe men and women would receive equal treatment in marriage. 

Men that are married receive a better deal because of gender expectations.  One author writes, "Women's and men's expectations about family formation against a background of ideas about masculinity and femininity, fatherhood and motherhood” (Maynes, 8).   Since men will always be men and women will always be women, men will always be better off than married women.  Gender cannot change.  Although gender expectations can change, the fact is married men will never bear children or become mothers.  Gender expectations don't need to change, but the appreciation of the accomplishments of both married men and women can change.  It is not a matter of work, but a matter of appreciation. Maybe in the future, married men and women can benefit equally from marriage.