Thanksgiving

Holidays provide great opportunities to see how gender relations play out in family life. This Thanksgiving was my first time at home this semester. It was interesting to be able to apply what I have read about and learned in class to what happens in my family. My mom has always been the person who cooks in my house. During Thanksgiving, though, there is much more food and she can't make everything by herself. So who helps? The women. It's a classic scenario. The women are in the kitchen making food while the men are in the living room watching tv, relaxing, and waiting for the food to be ready.

Why is it like this? That's something that I always ask myself. It really is quite complicated. Societal expectations definitely play a huge role here. My mom told me that she taught all of the kids in my family to cook, but that my brother just wasn't interested. Maybe it's true that he just doesn't like cooking as much as my sister and I do. But I imagine that's based a lot on what he's been told he should be interested in since he was born. I don't think the central idea here is cooking, I think it's more about how we are taught to spend our time. I have always been taught to help my mom and to do what I can to make my family happy (not just by my family but by society in general). I don't think my brother was taught the same thing. My brother loves my family just as much as I do, but he hasn't been socialized to contribute to it in the same way that I have. It's interesting now to realize that things that I have always assumed to be personal differences may actually be much more gendered in their nature.