Women in a "Man's Society"

Abstract

The contradictions between women's roles in production and in family have long been a topic of discussion. It is less readily recognized that no matter what paths she opts for—a career, a combination of job and family, or serving family alone—a woman's personality is frustrated, her relations with world sometimes filled with tension and discomfort. One of reasons for this is ambiguous nature of our ideas about place of women in society, and influence of traditional patriarchal views such as the weaker sex is meant to devote herself wholly to family. The contradictory nature in process of emancipation is felt especially acutely at level of mass consciousness. The recurrent discussions in press, at times very militant, give evidence of this. Behind artificially inflamed passions, enumeration of rights and duties, aspirations and possibilities, stands a real problem, or more precisely a set of problems: what demands does society place on women today, how ...