Family trends have been changing ever since the family was established. The involvement of work in the family has helped to make this change possible. Work and family should ideally fit together allowing people to earn a living as well as to enjoy family life (Aulette 138). Balancing both is a challenge we usually meet depending on our parents and children. These changes in work and the family have impacted not just the family, but the family as an organization. I will examine the Myth of Separate Spheres, women in the paid labor force, the different stages of work and family, and how work directly influences families. Along with this examination I will also point out whether these changes have been positive or negative in respect to the world as a whole. .
During the industrialization era, many productive activities that took place within families, were moved to factories as society was industrialized (Aulette 139). With these developments peoples ideas about what the family is like or should be like began to change. The new ideology separated women from men, placing men in the public work sphere and women in the domestic family sphere. These spheres segregated the study of work into two models, a job model and a gender model. Men workers were studied using the job model to explain their behavior, while women workers were studied using the gender model. The job model states that men are in their proper sphere and that there roles in their families do not relate to work The gender model for women focuses on the assumption that women put their families first before work, and that they are not in their true "sphere" in the labor force (Aulette 140). These myths come from the fact that this was the way things were a long time ago. If not for WWII who knows were women would be in the labor force today. When the men went off to war, women took over their roles as laborers in the workplace.
