Gender roles also play an important role within a marriage. As explained in our text, there are many roles for men and women involved in starting a marriage. Just in the act of courtship and proposal, common customs include bride service (the man must work for the bride's family before or after the wedding), bride wealth (goods offered by the groom's relatives to the bride's relatives). bride to seal a marriage) or the giving of a dowry, in which the bride's relatives give the goods of the groom's relatives (Nanda, Serena and Richard L. Warms 161-162). Within American society, gender roles are quite stratified. Even though times are changing, there is still a lot of pressure on women to stay at home and on men to be the breadwinners. This is linked to what our text calls the private/public dichotomy, in which women's status is lowered due to their association with motherhood and housework, while men's status is raised by being linked 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, where a 1950s housewife is compared to a modern housewife. These scenarios demonstrate how much has changed in the last half century or so regarding women's rights. However, even though women in the workplace are much more common these days, the fact that wives are both mothers and workers is still very burdensome. As discussed in Society: The Basics, by John Macionis, many working mothers today experience what is known as the “second shift”: “As women enter the workforce, the amount of housework performed by women has decreased , but the share done by women has remained the same…[women] do many more household chores than men” (Macionis, John J. 281)...... middle of paper...... n Masculinity." Top Documentary Films RSS. Np , nd Web. July 10, 2014. .Keenan, Jillian. "The 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 AmericaS,” 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. Press.