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May 9
, 2003
Study
Compares Mother’s, Father’s Days
On average, Mother’s
Day celebrations last two hours longer than Father’s Day
celebrations, yet mothers tend to be less satisfied with their
special day, according to a study by Nicole L. Gilbert ’99,
a graduate student in the College’s psychology and education
department, that compares the two holidays and illuminates what
society values in motherhood and fatherhood. For her thesis, titled
“Flowers for Mom, a Tie for Dad: Doing Gender on Mother’s
and Father’s Day,” Gilbert interviewed fifty-three
couples to learn how the two holidays are celebrated, and what
those celebrations say about the expected roles of mothers and
fathers.
What Gilbert found was that, in activities and the giving of gifts,
families underscored the traditional notions of mothers as nurturers
and fathers as providers, even when both parents worked outside
the home and advocated an equal division of domestic labor. Her
study is one of few to compare the holidays.
Gilbert found that
most of the ways Mother’s Day is celebrated—taking
Mom out to dinner, releasing her from household chores for the
day, and visiting other family members—are tied to the traditional
notions of mothers as parents and nurturers. Fathers, on the other
hand, were less likely to be taken out to dinner or to visit family,
and their gifts revolved around either work—neckties—or
individualistic personal pursuits—golf clubs and fishing
rods. Mothers were far more likely than fathers to report that
household chores were done differently for the holiday. Gilbert
found, too, that Mother’s and Father’s Day gifts are
much more likely to be stereotypically masculine or feminine than
the gifts given to those same mothers and fathers on their birthdays.
Disappointment was
more common among mothers than fathers, with the cause usually
family-centered: an inappropriate gift, a fight, a cranky child.
“Clearly these mothers felt that their families were not
fulfilling their expectations of how the day should be spent,”
Gilbert said.
Gilbert’s work is grounded in the idea that “gender
is not something you are, but something you do,” and she
notes that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are rare
among holidays because they are “occasions through which
gender is created.” The two holidays are events in which
society’s “normative conceptions of masculinity and
femininity” play out in the family home, even among families
that might disagree with those conceptions.
“It is true
that Mother’s and Father’s Day interrupt our routine;
however, I will argue that, instead of ridding people of ‘everyday
roles,’ they are reminded of their positions as mothers
and fathers and as a result may even behave more stereotypically
on these two days than on nongendered occasions,” Gilbert
says. “I am certainly not arguing for a movement to abolish
Mother’s and Father’s Day, but I am hoping that one
day these celebrations will not be as gendered. Perhaps in the
future when children think about gifts to give on these occasions
they will not be so eager to give Mom flowers and Dad a tie.”
Gilbert was advised by Professor of Psychology and Education Francine
M. Deutsch, the author of Halving It All: How Equally Shared
Parenting Works (Harvard University Press, 1999), the result
of her qualitative study focusing on how couples transformed parental
roles to create truly equal families.
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