Parsons — gender roles and the family
Parsons described family gender roles as natural and functional: instrumental role (breadwinner, external tasks, male) and expressive role (emotional support, internal tasks, female) are complementary and efficient.
Real World
Post-war British advertising of the 1950s — such as campaigns showing women using Hoover appliances while husbands read the newspaper — perfectly encapsulates Parsons' instrumental/expressive role division as both a social reality and an ideological prescription of the era.
Exam Focus
Challenge Parsons by citing Young & Willmott's symmetrical family or Oakley's evidence that expressive roles are socially constructed, not biologically fixed.
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