EXHIBITS
Advice Literature : Young Single Adults
Young Single Adults
The gender roles young single adults learned at church, home, and school went hand in hand with one another. Although gender roles were taught and learned in different ways in each setting, they all taught the same thing. Women were to be homemakers and nurturers for the children and men were to be the breadwinners for the family. Husband and wife were expected to work together to achieve family and marital happiness. "Young adults would strive to restore health to the family." [1] Young single adults looked toward marriage with this same mindset.
Gender roles were made clear through the literature of the time in education. Through junior high and high school, homemaking classes were geared toward girls. As these girls became young single adults, they used the skills they learned in these classes and carried out the gender roles that they had learned to help them be better homemakers. Young men weren’t forgotten in these classes, there are small section in the homemaking text books for men that focused on very basic functions in the kitchen. This again taught that men were to be out in the workforce, not in the home, the wife takes care of the home.
LDS literature for young single adults focused on the guidelines for dating. Young single adults were strongly advised to go on multiple dates with multiple people to build friendships, be sure that they knew the kind of person they wanted to marry, and to ensure that young single adults could refrain from becoming committed to a someone sooner than they were ready to. (see ABC's of Dating on the left) The gender roles were also made very clear through this literature; "Girls wait at home until fellows ask them out. Some girls are never invited; some fellows. more than girls know, never muster the courage to do the inviting." [2]
Media, among other things, structured how the perfect home life should be. The mothers taught the young women to bake, cook, clean, and how to do laundry because that’s what a “good wife” did. The young men were taught by their fathers to work hard because that is what they would be doing when they got married. The woman should work within the home, be happy, and dote on her husband. The man should work as the breadwinner for the family and rarely help out with any duties around the home. These ideas were instilled in young men and young women and stayed with them when they became young single adults. (see Kenwood advertisement on the left)
[1] Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 40.
[2] Lowell L. Bennion, Looking Towards Marriage (Salt Lake: Deseret Book Company, 1972), 8.
Created by Madilynn Barr