Rates Of Consensual Union Among Female Students example essay topic

The Changing Roles Of Women Of Sweden Introduction Sweden has developed a modern industrial culture based on natural resources, technical skills, and a sense of quality. Along with this modern culture, the roles of Swedish women have changed drastically in the last 100 years. The degree to which and the speed with which changes have occurred, however, are somewhat more difficult to evaluate. In this paper, I will present some data related to gender roles in the family.

I will also include some examples of child rearing, division of labor between the spouses and gender roles in relation to cohabitation and marriage. This data will allude to evidence of changes in female employment rates and fertility rates as well as some important information on governmental policies in Sweden. Cohabitation Sweden is an essentially atheistic and non-moralistic society with open-minded norms concerning the way men and women choose to live together. The choice between a formal marriage and informal cohabitation has for a long time been an essentially private matter. There is no set way to any particular family formation, Swedish family law (last revised in 1987) is not confined to married couples. The law treats unmarried and married couples equally in most aspects.

For example, the law makes no distinction between married and unmarried couples with respect to tax assessment or housing allowances or child benefits (Hoem, 39). This liberal view, later encoded in the law, may help explain Sweden so rapidly accepted non-marital cohabitation compared to many other countries, soon regarding it as a social institution rather than as deviant behavior. Non-marital cohabitation is not a new practice in Sweden, especially in Stockholm and in the northern parts of the country. According to Swedish history, there were two different types of cohabitation at the beginning of the century. One very visible type was called sam vets" (marriage of conscience) and was practiced by a group of intellectuals as a protest against the fact that only religious marriage existed in Sweden at the time. This in turn may have been influenced by the Bohemian movement in Norway that also began about that time.

The protest was successful in that civil marriage (roughly equivalent in status to American / British common-law marriage) was introduced in 1909. The other form of consensual union was called Stockholm" (Stockholm marriage) and was common among poor people who could not afford to marry (Hoem 41). As time went on, this practice of cohabitation became less poplar, perhaps due to a moralistic backlash. It did not become co! mm on again until the 1960's, no doubt influenced by the free-love and anti-war movements in the US. When informal cohabitation suddenly started to grow again in popularity, it received almost no public attention initially.

When marriage rates fell dramatically, it became clear that the number of marriages was no longer a reliable measure of family formation. Consensual unions were recognized in the 1975 census. Nevertheless, it came as a real surprise when the 1981 Swedish Fertility Survey revealed that as many as every third Swedish woman born in the period 1936-1940 had started her first union without marriage (Hoem 44). The survey also showed that these cohabitants, who most often came from the working class, married soon afterwards, and that durable consensual unions were relatively rare. In subsequent groups, non-marital unions progressively became even more common and such unions stayed intact for increasingly longer periods of time. A modern consensual union does not necessarily have all the characteristics of a legally sanctioned marriage.

The behavior of cohabitants is sufficiently different from that of married people to merit regarding consensual union as a separate civil status, in particular because people live in such unions for relatively long periods of their lives. Childbearing behavior in consensual unions most resembles that in marital unions in the working class. Young women from the upper class, on the other hand, rapidly adopted cohabitation as a practical living arrangement but were not willing to have children before marriage. According to Hoem (1994), students adopted this new behavior more quickly than most other groups, but it would be wrong to say that students initiated modern cohabitation in Sweden. This group adopted this practice because it gave them a type of union that suited their needs. Rates of consensual union among female students more than doubled between those born! between 1936-1940 and 1946-1950.

Like other groups that did not consider marriage not a realistic option, students were quick to take the opportunity to live together, possibly as a 'test marriage' and many young people took this step after having known each other for only a short time. Undoubtedly, starting a consensual union is not seen as a definitive indication of commitment. Factors Influencing the Disposition to Marry Among Cohabiting Women Modern cohabitation is one of the more important socio-cultural innovations of recent decades. It has changed the pattern of family formation radically. Since the mid-1970's, almost all Swedish women who have married had been cohabitants first. Nevertheless, little is known about why some people subsequently marry and others do not.

One factor that might contribute to marriage is pregnancy. A pregnancy clearly increases the marriage rate among childless women who cohabit ate in their first union. For both pregnant and non-pregnant women, however, the incidence of marriage has diminished strongly. Even though a declining fraction married during the first few years of cohabitation, they remained highly influenced by the imminent arrival of a child. This in turn implies that marital fertility has remained relatively constant.

It has also remained relatively independent of cohabitation al duration before marriage (Hoem 49). The Deferment of First Birth The implications for a woman living with a man changed after the mid-1960's. Judging from the behavior of women born in the late 1930's, most of them must have entered a union to start a family and have children quickly, and almost 30 percent of them were pregnant at the time they started marriage or cohabitation. Many of these children were unplanned; two-thirds of women who became pregnant before the first union formation reported that their pregnancy came too early or was not wanted (Trost 237). By contrast, less then 5 percent of women born in the late 1950's were pregnant when they entered their first union, even though more than twice as many had started a union as teenagers (almost 50 percent compared to less than 20 percent among women born twenty years earlier).

The real postponement of the start of childbearing since the late 1960's manifested itself as a decrease over the groups in age-specific first-birth rates at young ages. Among women born in the early 1940's, only about one-fourth had not entered motherhood by the age of twenty-eight. The corresponding number was as much as 45 percent for women born in the early 1960's. One popular explanation for the postponement of first birth is the improved education for women. Any educational impact on the age at entry into motherhood can hardly have been direct, however, for it is highly questionable whether time spent in school at the relevant ages has been sufficiently extensive to merit any prime role in the story of childbearing in Sweden (Hoem 51). Most women complete their schooling as early as at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and there has been almost no change in the educational pattern at higher ages during the last fifteen years, which is the period of first-birth post po!

(Hoem 45). To the extent that improved education has had an effect, it must have been indirect, for example via women's improved chances in the labor market. In line with this, it is often argued that it has become more important for a woman to achieve a firm foothold in the labor market before having her first child, since most Swedish women for see themselves working for most of their adult lives. One reason is the regulation covering Swedish leave policy, in which the most extensive improvements in parental benefits have been limited to employed parents. These benefits are based on earnings, which is an inducement to try to achieve as a good a salary as possible before entering motherhood. This will be important not only in order to improve one's income compensation during parental leave but also for later segments of life when caring for a child may hamper a woman's ability to improve her income and make progress in her job.

Child rearing Some years ago (in 1976) data was collected from a Swedish sample of mothers with small children. In a study done with Trost (1983), they asked the respondents three questions about how serious it was if a child, aged 5-6 years, took things that were not theirs (pilfering) from home or stores. They were also asked three questions about how important it was that a child in this age group thanked, greeted, and had good table manners. The sex of the child was not specified but was done so in a way as to not overestimate the differences between the gender-role expectations of the mother. The results revealed a clear tendency on the part of the mothers of boys to count the activities as less serious and more normal than the mothers of girls did, i.e. boys could be allowed to behave more "negatively" than girls (Trost 239). Division of labor between the spouses According to traditional gender-roles, the mother is the spouse who takes care of, and has the responsibility for, the child or the children, in most respects.

In one study the respondents fulfilling four criteria were asked which one of the two parents most often took care of the children in seven respects. The four criteria were: being a woman; being a mother to at least one child younger than 10 years; living together with a man who was gainfully employed; and being herself employed (either part-time or full-time). The result showed that 97 percent of the mothers claimed that the responsibility for the children's clothes was mostly with the mother; that the mother in 80 percent of the cases had the responsibility for the children's food; that the mother in 74 percent of the cases mostly stayed at home when the children were sick or went with the children to the physician or dentist; and that the mother in 53 percent of the cases took care of the children at night. The only two instances where the answer "mostly the mother" was less frequent were to the questions, "who consoles the children" and "who plays with the children". To further emphasize the traditional gender-roles the mothers answered "mostly the father" only in less than 14 percent of the cases, while in the remaining cases the answer was "both parents equally often". (Trost 241-244).

Conclusion It is clear that the roles of women in society and in the family have changed considerably. As one indicator of these changes, the rate of women in the work force was used. It was found that the relative number of women who are gainfully employed has increased. Not only has the rate increased for women with teenagers or older children but also to a very great extent for women with small children.

Today a woman, even one with small children, has improved identity not only as a mother but also as a human being. The high employment rate is not only a reflection of financial needs but also the need for self-realization, self-identity and liberalization. The fertility rate, in a sense, has decreased and the fewer number of children born are born later in a woman's life and during a shorter time span. This means that many women in their twenties will finish their educational and occupational training and find a job with a 'tenure position' before they give birth to their firs! t child.

In order to keep their position in the labor market they take a leave of absence after the birth of the child, a leave of between seven and twelve months after which they return to work. As a general rule, society as a whole has over the last several decades made many attempts to equalize the gender-roles for men and women and even to change their content in various respects. Swedes who are active in child socialization activities seem to be very radical and argue for changes in the gender-roles towards equalization. Society demands and claims equality, which is bound to produce some kind of norm conflict and risk of deviation from the norm for teenagers and even young adults. Knowing that norms may be in opposition to one another does not have to mean a state of abnormality; it may mean simply taking a stand for one norm or the other.

Bibliography

Hoem, Britta. (1995) The New Role of Women: Sweden.
Colorado: Westview Press Inc. Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. (1999).
Sweden. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation. Trost, Jan, (1983) The Changing Position of Women in Family and Society: Sweden.
Vol. 34) E.J. Brill, Leiden: The Netherlands World Wide Web Resources 1 Appleqvist, Katerina. "Sweden: Folks am and the Women Security Programme (1995).