Profile for Amelia McDonell-Parry

Watching Mad Men has made me slightly nostalgic (well as “nostalgic” as I can be for an era in which I wasn’t even a zygote) for the days when people drank at 9am (at work too!), men wore suits every day, and women rocked brooches and perfectly coiffed up-do’s. But it also has made me think about traditional gender roles, particularly the role of the woman in the home — cooking, cleaning, attending to the social calendar, and raising the children. Now that women are largely active and succeeding in the work force, “women’s work” has become something that a lot of women don’t want to do, have to do, or know how to do. While I love to cook and cleaning is my OCD vice, I can’t sew to save my life and wouldn’t know what to do when it came to making a table centerpiece. Catherine can’t cook and doesn’t have an interest in learning — but because so many of our mothers still fit these roles when we were growing up, do modern men still expect their future wives to nurture in the same way, despite having careers outside the home? In a nutshell, will Catherine’s future hubby be letdown when she tells him, “Sorry mister, I am not going to learn how to cook your mother’s famous tuna casserole”? I decided to ask the guys on my IM whether they still expect modern women to be “domestically skilled”. Keep reading »