Un-Expected Gender Roles

    As I've been reading Snow Flower & The Secret Fan, I keep thinking about how the women in this novel lead a life so drastically different than mine.  Only after we read "The Social Construction of Gender" did I start trying to find the similarities between the current expectations of women in Western culture versus the expectations of Chinese women in the 1800's.  Our roles as women and men is one that changes; and in a time as progressive as what we are living in, we'd like to think that we are above embodying gender roles. 
    When we analyze the past, it is easy to see how gender roles shaped the people who lived in them.  Women and men took on the roles that were expected of them, most of the time, and tried to live up to those pre-set standards.  As time goes on and the world becomes increasingly inter-connected, we see more people struggling to break free of those gender roles: to be an individual. 
    Growing up, I knew I was a female inside and out.  However, when I was figuring out my sexuality, I wondered if I was living life in my female role just because that is what I had been taught.  An experiment began: I tried different things like wearing men's clothes, finding more gay friends, taking on a more masculine role in my romantic relationships with women, reading more about gender and feminism, and exploring what it meant to me to be a gay woman.  After several years I realized that I didn't have to fit into any one category, I could do it all!  I started performing in both drag shows and burlesque shows, two venues that allow people to play up, or down, gender stereotypes.  This new-found freedom gave me a new perspective on my personal gender role in society, and made me comfortable with my own dreams and aspirations. 
    Now that I've been in a few long-term relationships with women, I've begun to see how gender roles appear on their own.  According to many gay women, I should be using the rights that women before me fought for to go against the grain.  I should deny any inclination to an expected female role in my relationships.  But, when I think about what I really want in life, it is to enjoy my education, and to build a home and a family with my partner.  Oddly enough, I think I might be happy as a stay-at-home mom, focusing on my family and spending time on my creative passions.  Some of these desires are stereotypes that women struggled against for ages.  Is it a biological fact that some women are more inclined to want to be a mother before anything else?  Is that bad?  These are questions that come up when I think about exercising my rights as a woman in a progressive and developed country.  I don't feel pressure to start a family and settle down like many women before me have.  I do, however, feel pressure to not take advantage of the freedoms that are at my disposal. 
     Gender roles come in many shapes and sizes these days, and it is hard to know which one we're falling into, until it's too late.  But here we are, in a Women and Gender Studies class, with the freedoms to discuss the oppressions and opportunities that lay before us and that linger in the past. 

    My only question at this point is: Does it go against everything we have fought for, to want to live in a gender role that was once expected of us?