Gender roles also play an important role in marriage. As explained in our text, the men and women involved in starting a marriage play many roles. Just in the act of courtship and proposal, common customs include bride's service (the man must work for his bride's family before or after marriage), bride's wealth (property presented by parents from the groom to the bride's parents to seal a marriage) or the gift. of a dowry, in which the bride's parents give family assets to the groom (Nanda, Serena and Richard L. Warms 161-162). Within American society, gender roles are quite stratified. Although times are changing, there is still great pressure on women to stay at home and on men to be breadwinners. This is related to what our text calls the private/public dichotomy, in which women's status is lowered because of their association with childbearing and domestic work, while men's status is elevated because of their connection to power and economics (Nanda, Serena and Richard L. Warms). 192). This also relates to the "How to be a Good Wife" scenarios we read in class, in which a 1950s housewife is compared to a modern housewife. These scenarios prove how much women's rights have changed over the last half century. However, even though there are many more women in the workplace these days, the weight of being both a mother and a worker remains very heavy on wives. As John Macionis explains in Society: The Basics, many working mothers today experience what's known as the "second shift": "As women enter the workforce, the amount of housework that they do has decreased, but the share that women do has remained the same…[women] do a lot more housework than men” (Macionis, John J. 281)... ... middle of article ...... n Masculinity. " Top Documentary Films RSS. Np , nd Web. July 10, 2014. .Keenan, Jillian. “Next step: we must legalize polygamy. No Joke.” Slate Magazine. The Slate Group, April 15, 2013. Web. July 10, 2014. .Macionis, John J. “Chapter 10: Gender Stratification.” Society: The Basics. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011. 281. Print. McGee, Kunhardt. “Makers: Women Who Make America,” PBS, February 2013. Web, July 10, 2014. Nanda, Serena and Richard L. Warms. : Marriage, family and kinship, chapter 8: Sex and gender. "Culture Matters: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2012. 151-202. Print.