I enjoyed this article because it brought to light the assumptions that are made about marriage, age, and home ownership. The home is the ideal symbol for children. When we think of someone owning a home, we think of a white picket fence,marriage, children, and pets. Audrey Irvine, the home owner is in her 40's and has no children, her friends and family become more blunt about questions and pressure to have children. "Society does seem to put an enormous amount of pressure on women once they hit the later years of childbearing age. Assumptions are made that every personal decision is a reflection of your desire to have, or not have, children." Irvine says. When a woman or even a man buys a home people assume that they must have bought it because they are ready to have children, because why else would they buy a house? There is a lot of symbolic interaction in this article, the way our props set us up for certain roles and expectations we are supposed to play. It appears that we do not use our props but they use us. We feel like we have to live up to the meaning and symbols these objects apply. If we do not then we are under pressure from others.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/06/24/rr.get.house.get.kids/index.html
--eric
thanks to http://otal.umd.edu/~vg/mssp96/ms06/rowe1.jpg for the image
Excellent refernce to Symbolic Interactionism! The house as performance prop--I love it.
ReplyDelete