SECTION 1. LISTENING I. PART 1

70.

Question III. Read the passage and choose the best answers to questions below. Write the answers on

your answer sheet. (10 pts)

Traditional education creates, in time, an incomplete image on family’s gender roles. From

generation to generation children interiorize theirs parent’s model known as “separated world’s myth” –

a wife and a mother only cooking ,doing laundry and taking care of the child “contrasting” with a

husband and a father working or fixing different things. According to this mentality each partner has

established responsibilities in private and public life that other one couldn’t take over.

Changing traditional gender roles seems to be difficult not because woman or man don’t have the

necessary skills for other one’s tasks but because everyone carries on a symbol of his “world”. Society’s

evolution especially on woman valorization redefines gender roles promoting a woman more active,

ambitious and independent and a man more emotional and involved in household tasks.

Women of our days have more liberty to choose between the “family model” – these ones are

being more obedient and anchored in tradition (the feminine type) and the “feminist model” – who’s

priority is the career (the anti-feminine type) or the middle model adopted by the “double career”

type of woman – profession and family. On the base of any of these choices are variables like social-

status, race, education level, culture’s values etc.

We are assisting to a reprioritization of woman needs and so professional success became

more interesting and even attractive than family one probably because it brings something new.

Women are motivated to choose the career by elements as the wish for financial independency,

the need to prove her capacities, to open and better integrate in modern society and the possibility

to control and not being only controlled. All this reasons offer her a psychological equilibrium.

Most of the men consider women’s career as a conflict source having arguments like: women

will neglect theirs family attributions, the imminent change of man’s authority, his incertitude

concerning the professional competition and the risk to deteriorate the marital relation. Even at first side

man and children are felling the stress generated by the new status of woman, she’s living an interior

conflict as well. Woman need to understand her need for self-accomplishment but the remains of

traditional mentality still affect her modern vision.

So our children should make a difference on gender roles perspective but we are in a vicious circle

because every family is raising their kids for a passed time, influenced by their own mentality and

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resistance to change. The main idea is that both women and men should consider this role’s exchange

like a challenge and also accept that a man as well as a woman can do anything with willing.