What I’ve learned in Sociology

Finally done with classes this semester. This semester had by far the best classes I’ve taken. One was Sociology of Gender, which I have to admit I had never spent much time thinking about. It quickly became my favourite class of the semester, and I’m glad I took it. But I think I learned something from my classmates that I hadn’t expected to learn.

Apparently I was not raised like everyone else. I’m not sure how much I can take from this class at face value, but if I believe what they say, I was raised by hippies. I’m not sure if everyone else in the class just answers how they think they should, or if they’re sincere. We’ve certainly been trained to give the “right” answer. This class often talks about gender roles in the household, eg: women cook, men do manual labor, women take care of children, men make the money, etc. That wasn’t the case in my family.

Tasks were shared between my mother and father. If I was sick at school, and someone needed to take me home, the parent with fewer obligations came to get me, it was not automatically the mother (an example used several times in class with much assent from other students). My dad cooked a lot, and when he didn’t, he would do dishes. Apparently this is not normal.

I’m not claiming that there were no gendered activities in my house growing up. My dad would mow the lawn, chop wood, and build things. My mom would cook larger holiday meals, sew Halloween costumes and so on. But these were not steadfast rules, and I remember stacking cords of wood with both my parents, and helping both prepare Christmas dinner (ok, I probably didn’t help).

I dunno, maybe I’m taking extreme examples that were used in class to prove a point too literally, or maybe I have an ultra-heteronormative sociology class. Either way, I think more than anything else I learned how ‘progressive’ my household was/is. Weird.