"The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Women and Economics"

I agree. I believe that in the past, because men and women produced different amounts of labour in the workplace and in the household, it was more economically efficient to have women produce household labour while having men produce workplace labour. But as women begin to meet and surpass the level of educational attainment that men achieve, the argument that women should still remain economically dependent on men becomes obsolete. This economic dependence might have been the most rational thing to do in the past, but the same can not be said today. I believe that men and women should equally contribute to household and workplace labour in order to be most productive.

I would agree with Christopher's point that men and women should share an equal amount of workload in the household to maximize productivity to an extent. However, this may not always be the case as it depends on whether men and women choose prioritize work or family.

For my second theory essay, my theoretical hook is an example of a woman whose husband has to do more household work than her. When Anne-Marie Slaughter was appointed the first woman Director of Policy Planning to the US State Department from 2011 to 2012, she was only able to return home on the weekends from Washington, DC to Princeton, NJ to her two teenage boys. In her opinion article written in The Atlantic magazine, she proposed that "women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately)". In Slaughter's case, her husband - also a professor at Princeton university - spend more time with their children at home more than herself. After 2012, Slaughter quits the civil service job to spend more time with her children, stating how "my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible."

Thus, I believe that sharing the household workload is to be determined by each individual couple as it is impossible to make a generalization that the workload is to be shared equally.