One Weekend a Month
Yeah, women should be able to do everything men are able to do. But where do you go with something like this?
I graduated from Texas A&M so a good number of my friends joined the National Guard. But with one exception, they were all male. The idea was that you’d be available for your country but would likely only have to serve one weekend a month and would only be called away for a national emergency. This decision is most often made before kids come into the picture. If kids do happen to come into the picture, there is very likely a female available to take care of those kids for you so you can serve your country. But what happens if you are female, made this decision before kids, but have kids now and don’t have anyone you can count on to take care of them while you are off serving your country?
It’s certainly a rather desperate situation and one which begs the question as to the integrity of signing young people up for such rigid future commitments when they are young and single.
It reminds of a time when I was a young man when conscription applied in Australia; I remember hurriedly opening the government letter advising whether or not I was included in the latest ballot to serve in Vietnam. My name did not come out of the barrel. From 1965 to 1972 over 19,000 served and many were killed or wounded before conscription was finally abolished in 1972.
However in relation to this posting what do you think the reaction would be if a male was depicted with exactly the same situation/ responses? It causes me to ponder as to whether there is a societal assumption a womens bond to the child means they are much more likely to agree to look after the children in any desperate situation and that mothers are more likely to favour looking father the sons children over the daughters. ? I’ m not sure whether that really applies most of the time or not.
Best wishes
Wow. I didn’t realize that many people from Australia were killed in the Vietnam war. I grew up in the shadow of the war and all of the stories of people who had lost their children and the hippies protesting against it. (I think the U.S. had something like 150,000 deaths.)
There is a lot of fear that the U.S. will reinstate the draft and that is of huge concern to me since both my son and daughter could potentially be drafted if it is reinstated in the future. (My son’s friends are all worried about it.)
You pose an interesting question although I’m not sure I totally follow it. Could you possibly rephrase the question?
It’s more difficult for me to imagine a male in the same situation as this woman and that may be unfair. But here’s how my thinking goes:
It is still a societal expectation that women will take care of their children. So if a male ended up in this situation, he’d receive way more sympathy than the female and people would be far more likely to come to his aid. I think people are more hardnosed about helping the female because while it is societally acceptable and even admirable for males to sign up for the National Guard, it is far less societally acceptable for a female to do so.
Hi Laura
I think you have already answered most of my question, but let me rephrase/ expand.
The posting had me pondering about gender influences in societal assumptions over there.
E.g. Is it generally accepted women are more likely to agree to look after their children in any desperate situation than are males given the same underlying conditions? If so does the initial child bonding continue to be the strong influencer or are there other factors? Is that assumed bias less evident today and if so what are the societal influencers.
Assuming child nurturing and raising was spit 50/50 would the bias disappear?
Given a gender reversal what proportion of females would react in the exact same way as that depicted of the male father?
Is this example generally representative of many males today or is it clearly unrepresentative of a tiny minority ?.
Are mothers more likely to favour looking after their son’s children in preference to their daughter’s children?
If this be the case what are the reasons for such a societal bias?
Best wishes
Oh! I see what you are asking. I don’t know the actual statistics about mothers being more willing to look after their son’s children than their daughters - but I have a very difficult time thinking that would be true in a desperate case like this one. That wasn’t the problem in this video, was it? As I recall, the mother was willing to look after her daughter’s children, but the daughter didn’t want the mother to do so unless she agreed to temporarily move away from her boyfriend who had apparently abused her children at some point.
There continues to be a very strong societal bias that women are the natural caregivers - both for children and for the elderly. Caregiving isn’t anywhere near 50/50 and it is almost impossible for me to imagine it ever will be 50/50 - especially as long as we remain such a heavily conservative Christian nation.
I don’t know if it is assumed that women will be more likely to take care of their children in a desperate situation. That’s not an assumption I’d make, at least. But I do think women are expected to be around for their children and are not viewed compassionately when they make decisions that make them unavailable to their children. The same bias doesn’t exist for men.