Feminism and Care Perspectives

Glass half full; Glass half empty. Perree’s use of the latter idiom is a clever way to demonstrate the economic and political changes of gender perspectives in terms of the family. Right at the beginning of her article she considers the loose definition of gender analysis and its effects in terms of perceiving a glass as either full or empty; “a loose definition of gender as a variable distinguishing women and men as individuals or as defining relationships located within the context of family is omnipresent” (Perree, 2010).

Many of the articles that we read prior to this one present the change in the family and gender roles as a serious problem with negative consequences, such as Popenoe’s article on the American family decline. This is a perfect example where the glass is half empty because “family change has continued to be seen more as a crisis than an opportunity for challenging pervasive structures of societal inequalities” (Perree, 2010). With the nuclear family being so long associated with functionalism, more “emptiness is revealed by the continuing force of functionalism in defining a normative standard family…(Perree, 2010).

However there has been advancement in family studies even though Perree suggests it cannot fully include real gender analyses until economic and political changes in gender perceptions and other forms of inequality (race, class, age, etc.) are seen in a collective as well as individual way, there has been theoretical advancement. The glass can also be seen as full “in the volume of empirical research on families that takes gender relations rather than sex roles as its core analytic concept for thinking about women and men” (Perree, 2010). Unlike Popenoe who is weak in his arguments that are backed up by assumptions, I think Perree is very successful in getting her point across with all the structured studies she presents.

As Perree concludes that “attention to power and change will inevitably make studies of gender and family political”, I think it is just as important to figure out how to apply ‘deinstitutionalization’.

With more fullness of the glass being the theoretical advancement of the definition of gender perspective, which refers to the micro, meso, and macrolevels, with each “seen as relating systematically to each other” (Perree, 2010).