Publications under this topic cover new research on male-female relationships, gender equity in employment, and gay and lesbian issues. Look here for debates and essays on whether the gender revolution has stalled (at home or at work), how men’s and women’s behaviors and values are changing, and new research on reproductive issues.
Women now earn 58 percent of all undergraduate degrees. Not only do they enter college at higher rates than men, they are less likely to drop out once they enter. According to conventional wisdom, this is because men are less studious and committed to school than women. However, a new study, “Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out of College,” released this month in the journal Gender & Society, suggests quite a different reason for men’s dropout rates.
Topics of Expertise: Gender & SexualityThe last bastion of the feminine mystique may be a sexual mystique. Like the feminine mystique before it, the sexual mystique relies on the fantasy that men and women live in different worlds, and that these differences must be maintained for everyone to be turned on and sexually satisfied. According to this mystique a happy sex life requires a macho man who is in control and a woman who is charged up with desire, yet submissive and teachable.
Topics of Expertise: Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family LifeLatinas are often described as being either too devoted to their cultural values or not sufficiently connected to them. They are often told that they must choose “one of way of being,” either Latina or American. This expectation not only implies that there is an “authentic” Latina femininity and American femininity, but that their success depends on enacting the “right” femininity.
Topics of Expertise: Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life / Latino Families / Race, Ethnicity & CultureThe gendered mystique that still poses barriers to African-American women in their personal and public lives is perhaps best described as an “unfeminine mystique” – the idea that they have characteristics and embrace lifestyles that are outside the boundaries of “real” womanhood. This “unfeminine mystique” has plagued African-American women for more than 200 years.
Topics of Expertise: African American Families / Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life / Race, Ethnicity & CultureIn the 1950s and early 1960s, a woman’s first priority, even if she had superpowers, was to catch and keep a man. She caught him by being beautiful; she kept him by being adoring and submissive. Whatever powers she might possess, be they brains, creativity, or levitation, had to be suppressed as an unforgiveable threat to the male ego. Keeping a happy marriage was her primary aim; a clean house came second; and well-adjusted children, third.
Topics of Expertise: Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family LifeToday, a male manager who selected only young, beautiful women employees would be seen as a Neanderthal. But in the personal sphere, when a 50 year-old single man dates only much younger women, and chooses one to marry, few of his friends question his sense of entitlement to a younger woman.
Topics of Expertise: Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life
In the half century since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, many myths have grown up about what Friedan actually wrote and what the feminist movement, which she helped found, has and has not achieved. Here are four of the most common.
Topics of Expertise: Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family LifeBetty Friedan highlighted the many ways that cultural images and expectations of gender in the 1950s and 60s held women back. The expectations derived most obviously from patriarchy, which Friedan recognized, but also from white supremacy, capitalism, and heterosexism, which she did not. In Friedan’s time the feminine mystique certainly constrained women’s senses of themselves and their possibilities, but at least it recognized women as a group. The “lesbian mystique,” by contrast, denied lesbians even existed. The concept was literally inconceivable. In the 19th century, Queen Victoria is rumored to have flatly proclaimed: “Women don’t do that.”
Topics of Expertise: Gender & Sexuality / LGBTQ Partnering & Families
On the 50th Anniversary of The Feminine Mystique, Council on Contemporary Families Scholars identify what’s changed—and what hasn’t.
Topics of Expertise: Division of Labor in Families / Feminism & Families / Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life / LGBTQ Partnering & Families / Race, Ethnicity & Culture / Work & Family
By Thomas J. Linneman Associate Professor of Sociology The College of William and Mary tjlinn@wm.edu; 804-822-2282. He didn’t provide an answer in question format, but The College of William & Mary’s Thomas Linneman told us how women and men both use uptalk in his new study, “Gender in Jeopardy! Intonation Variation on a Television Game Show,” in the February issue of […]
Topics of Expertise: Gender & SexualityAssistant Professor of Family, Health, and Policy in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Utah
Associate Professor of Labor and Employment Relations and Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University
Associate Professor, Department of Family Science & Human Development, Montclair State University
Clinical Director, Perelman School of Medicine, Dept of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida
Professor of Sociology, Florida State University
Assistant Professor of Communication and Department Coordinator, Minot State University
Professor and Chair, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University
Professor, Department of Sociology & Population Studies Center, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Director of Sedona Counselling Centre of Montreal, Psychotherapist, Author, Divorce Recovery Expert
