For parents of color in the U.S., talking to their kids about race and racism is a fundamental aspect of parenting, but for white parents, most try to avoid these topics, or offer unhelpful lessons to “treat everyone the same.” This approach ultimately perpetuates colorblind racism and allows white privilege to remain a “lived but not seen” aspect of growing up white. However, a growing minority of “antiracist” white parents have begun intentionally speaking with their kids about systemic racism and whiteness. Both white moms and white dads report a desire to raise racially aware white children, but little is known about who is leading these efforts within white families and why.

In our recent Social Problems article, we examine this question using interview data from 28 “antiracist” white parents in heterosexual marriages to examine how and why gender influences which parent is more likely to discuss race/racism with their children.

In theory, the white moms and dads shared similar beliefs about race/racism and the importance of discussing these topics with their kids. In practice, however, moms disproportionately led these conversations. We trace this divergence between parents’ shared principals but unequal practices back to moms’ distinctively antiracist embrace of intensive mothering—a cultural ideology with extremely high expectations for moms’ involvement in their kids’ lives. More specifically, we highlight how moms refashioned three intensive mothering practices to develop the tools, resources, opportunities, and a sense of integrity needed to proactively talk with their kids about race.

(1) Moms pursued expert-guided education on race/racism. They listened to podcasts, joined book clubs, attended workshops, and followed DEI professionals on social media. Gracie, for example, described seeking guidance before her son was even old enough to talk: “I did research one night about talking to your kid about race, and found a book…I was just like, I need a place to start. I need some ideas. Let’s go to a professional.”  

(2) Moms took a hands-on role in their kids’ education, which allowed them to recognize racism in their children’s classrooms and curricula. These observations gave them concrete examples to discuss with their kids. Through classroom-volunteering, for instance, moms saw that teachers were “treating kids of color differently [and] disciplining them differently” (Heidi) and used their evolving race-related knowledge to explain to their kids that “the teachers are probably having unconscious bias in the classroom” (Audrey). 

(3) Moms strategically cultivated activities for their kids that de-centered whiteness or sought to advance racial equity. Moms joined antiracist community organizations and “racial equity teams” at their churches or synagogues, workplaces, or their kids’ schools, and would bring their kids to organization events, as well as marches/protests, whenever possible. These events served as natural conversation-starters, as Gabby explained: “It’s really easy to just invite conversation. We’ll go to things like protests, we’ll go to marches, so we’ll be surrounded by messages.” Getting involved in antiracist community coalitions also gave moms a sense of integrity to talk about racism with their kids. As Nadia explained:

I feel like if you aren’t doing anything it can be hard to talk about…it can be a little embarrassing [to say] like about race, “I should be making sure things are fair” but like not reading or doing anything actively…having even the small tiny thing that I’m doing…helps me feel empowered to talk about it more.

Culturally, dads don’t face the same intensive parenting pressure that moms do. Perhaps as a result, the dads in our study didn’t pursue the same level of racial re-education that moms did; they didn’t look for everyday examples of racism and inequality in their kids’ classrooms or curricula; and they didn’t plan race-related activities for their children. Consequently, they felt ill-equipped and unprepared to initiate conversations about race/racism, commonly saying they “don’t know how” (Erik). They were also less comfortable discussing race because as Nadia described, it feels awkward and phony to preach one thing but practice another. Whereas moms’ antiracist intensive mothering prompted them to pursue personal- and community-level work aimed at social change, dads weren’t “in the mud doing this type of stuff” (Miller), so they felt “bad and uncomfortable” (Jacob) talking about racism. As Jacob explained, “We don’t like to say we’re the foot on the neck of people who are different from us.”

Because dads were ill-equipped and uncomfortable initiating conversations proactively, they took a more passive approach. They were willing to answer their kids’ questions when asked but believed their kids should “dictate how much information they want” (Frank) and “tell you what they need to know” (Daniel). In other words, they looked to kids to instigate these conversations.

However, since moms had already established a communication line and demonstrated ongoing interest/knowledge about race, kids logically brought any questions about race to their moms instead of their dads. Together, moms’ proactive approach, dads’ passive approach, and kids’ response to this contrast created a reciprocal cycle that allowed race to become a “Mom topic” within these white families.

Why does it matter if antiracism is primarily moms’ domain? We suspect that gendered divisions of labor threaten the sustainability of antiracist parenting practices.

Norms of colorblindness and white silence are hard to break in white families, and new habits are even harder to maintain (and encourage kids to practice) if one parent is still practicing old ones. While there can certainly be “racism without racists,” white people also have significant agency in reducing racism, and white parents have an important part to play. Parents of color have always talked to their children about race and racism, because they do not have the privilege to remain silent. It’s time for more white moms and dads to follow suit and start talking with their white kids about these issues too.

Reilly Kincaid is a PhD Candidate at Purdue University. Her research focuses on family, gender, work, and social inequalities. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @ReillyKincaid.

Megan R. Underhill is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Asheville where she teaches and researches about race and racism among white Americans. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @Soc_Seeker.

When COVID-19 shuttered college campuses in March 2020, many—but not all—undergraduates sought refuge in their parents’ homes. Why did some students fall into this parental “safety net” while others did not? As three sociologists who have studied young adults’ relationships with their families, we suspected the answer would be more complex than need and availability alone would predict.

In a new study published in Socius, we analyzed survey data we collected from 750 undergraduates at two regional public universities in the United States to understand who moved home with their parents during the pandemic and who didn’t. We focused on whether students reported moving in with a parent because of the pandemic between March 2020 (when campus closed) and March 2021 (when we collected the survey).

Unsurprisingly, we found that students’ housing and financial needs influenced their decisions to return home. Students living in dorms, who were asked to leave the dormitories during the pandemic at the two universities we surveyed, were over three times as likely to move in with a parent compared to their off-campus peers (66% vs. 18%). For off-campus students, problems with their jobs such as being furloughed or laid off led to higher rates of moving to a parent’s home.

However, material needs weren’t the only factors in these decisions. Among students living off campus at the start of the pandemic, older students and those living with a romantic partner were less likely to move home with parents. The off-campus group included many students who would be considered non-traditional undergraduates: just over half (52%) were above the age of 24 and 38% were living with a romantic partner (including some who were married). Students who might be considered more “adult” by one or both measures were far less likely to move in with a parent, possibly because those students’ primary safety nets had shifted from their parents to their partners. Off-campus students living with siblings or extended family were also less likely to move home with their parents, which suggests that these relatives, like romantic partners, may have provided an alternative safety net.

On-campus students showed more similar rates of returning home across the different factors we analyzed, likely because their immediate housing needs took priority over other considerations. However, there was one notable exception: on-campus students who expressed negative feelings about asking their parents for money were more likely to move home.

At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive: if sharing housing is a form of help from parents, wouldn’t students reluctant to ask their parents for money also be reluctant to ask to move back home?

But this finding fits with our other research on family support in young adulthood. In interview projects examining young adults’ experiences with student loans, help from family after having a child, and understandings of financial (in)dependence, we found young adults viewed housing support as distinct from (and typically preferable to) direct financial help from their parents, often viewing it as less stigmatizing or imposing less of a burden. And those who were more reluctant to ask for money may also have found it more difficult to pay for the costs of independent housing once their dormitories closed. 

Given that students were surveyed a year after the initial campus closures, we may have also captured how the experience of living with their parents during the pandemic negatively influenced students’ feelings about asking parents for money. Students who moved in with a parent may have felt that asking for additional money would be too great of a burden on their families or would signal a failure to achieve adult independence (when that was already compromised). They may also have resented restrictions on their freedom they experienced in terms of rules in their parents’ homes during the pandemic and thus felt more reluctant to acknowledge needing help. Regardless of the direction of influence, the link between moving home and negative feelings about asking parents for money highlights the emotional tensions that so often characterize parental support at this life stage.

Overall, our study builds on past research describing social class divides in undergraduates’ reliance on parents during the pandemic by demonstrating how parents’ roles also change within families throughout young adulthood. The findings also highlight the role of other close relationships—romantic partners, siblings, and extended family members—as alternative sources of support for some undergraduates. And they offer a window into the tensions surrounding parental support during this transitional stage of life. Beyond increasing our understanding of the unprecedented historical event of the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings provide broader insight into the complicated social factors affecting whether young adults ask for help from their parents during times of need and uncertainty.

About the authors:

Elena G. van Stee is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an Exchange Scholar at Harvard University. She’s also the Blog Editor for Contexts, the public-facing periodical of the American Sociological Association. Follow her @elenavanstee.

Arielle Kuperberg is Professor of Sociology at UNC Greensboro, incoming Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. Follow her at @ATKuperberg.

Joan Maya Mazelis is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among the Poor. Follow her @JoanieMazelis.

Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jessica is an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of the forthcoming book Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024). Her previous books include Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (with Mario Small; University of California Press, 2022), Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), and A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Jessica has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She also blogs at ParenthoodPhD and is a mom of two young kids.

Here, I ask her about her new book, Holding it Together: How Women became America’s Safety Net, which is out now from Portfolio. You can find out more about Jessica at her at website. And you can follow her on Twitter @JessicaCalarco

AMW: How do we groom girls to stand in for the social safety net and when does that grooming start?

JC: Other high-income countries have invested in social safety nets to help people manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and ensure that people have time and energy to help take care of their communities, their families, their homes, and even themselves.

In the US, we’ve tried to DIY society. We’ve kept taxes low, slashed huge holes in the meager safety net we do have, and we’ve told people that if they just make “good choices,” they shouldn’t need a safety net at all. 

The problem, of course, is that we can’t actually DIY society. Forcing people to manage all that risk on their own has left many American families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse. 

And yet, we haven’t collapsed because women are holding it together, filling in the gaps in our economy and the gaps in our threadbare safety net. In the US, women are disproportionately the default caregivers for children and for the sick and elderly and destitute. They’re also the ones who disproportionately fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy—jobs in essential service sectors that are too labor-intensive to be both profitable and broadly accessible, including jobs in childcare and home health care. 

As I show in Holding It Together, women’s unpaid and underpaid labor helps maintain the illusion of a DIY society by making it seem as though we can get by without a net. And American culture grooms, guilts, and gaslights them into fill those gaps.

From the time girls are old enough to hold a babydoll, they’re taught to see themselves as helpers and treated by adults as mothers-to-be. Young girls are tasked with caring for their siblings, cleaning up around the house and the classroom, and even being teachers’ assistants and keeping their peers on track at school. 

This early socialization grooms girls to stand in for the social safety net. It leads many girls and women to see themselves as “naturally” suited for caregiving and thus to accept both paid and unpaid caregiving roles.  At the same time, and even if girls are skeptical of the idea of “naturally” gendered caregiving proclivities, their early experiences with caregiving also teach them that if they don’t do this work or do it well enough, there’s a good chance that no one else will. Which means that the choice not to step in and fill those gaps means letting down their family members, friends, and communities, who, in the context of a DIY society, may have nowhere else to turn for support.  Which is part of why women in the US experience a disproportionate amount of guilt. 

Meanwhile, a lack of similar socialization for boys grooms them to buy into the idea that caregiving is women’s work. That belief, as we saw on full display with NFL kicker Harrison Butker’s recent graduation speech, then allows boys and men to exploit the labor of girls and women without any feelings of guilt. ​Put differently, those beliefs allow boys and men to see themselves as “good guys” even if they do little or none of the work of care. 

AMW: What is the Supermom myth?

JC: The Supermom myth is one of a set of myths that I talk about in the book—myths that operate to delude Americans into believing that we can get by without ​a decent social safety net and to divide us by race, class, gender, religion, politics, and other life circumstances in ways that keep us from coming together to demand the kind of net that would better support us all. 

The Supermom myth, in particular, is the idea that American children are under threat and that only their mothers can protect them from harm. As I show in the book, many Americans believe this idea, at least in part, because of fear-mongering efforts intended to persuade them to think that way. And believing that myth operates to create the perception that we don’t need a social safety net, because mothers are the only ones capable of keeping their children safe. 

Take, for example, the Satanic Panic around childcare in the 1980s/90s. Conservative pundits and policymakers used wildly inaccurate allegations against childcare providers to stoke parents’ fears and create the perception that children are only safe at home. In light of those fears, and despite clear evidence of the benefits of communal care for both children and parents, many families pulled their children out of childcare centers or tried to avoid enrolling them if they could. And that pullback on trust in formal childcare also helped stemmed the tide on maternal employment, which had been increasing for decades and suddenly stalled. 

This fear of childcare has also persisted and continued to drive down maternal employment and drive up the guilt that American mothers feel when they engage in paid work. In a representative survey of more than 2,000 parents of children under 18 from across the US, I found that almost half (47 percent) of parents believe that it’s best for children if their mothers stay home and don’t work for pay. As I show in the book, those beliefs are attractive to women, particularly if their paid work opportunities are limited, or if they struggle to find the affordable childcare they would need to engage in full-time paid work, because being the Supermom offers them a way to feel that their work is valuable, even it isn’t highly paid or paid at all. At the same time, those beliefs also discourage mothers from fighting for a stronger social safety net, because, despite the toll this work takes on them, they’ve made doing the work of holding it together the source of their self-esteem. 

In the book, I also extend these analyses to include newer fears around childhood, including the panics around Critical Race Theory and transgender kids. And I show how conservative Christian mom-fluencers are stoking these fears and using them to undermine trust in schools and other government institutions while also promoting the “tradwife” trend. 

AMW: What would a better net mean?

JC: A better social safety net would use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and ensure that people have the time, energy, and incentive help take care of their communities, their families, their homes, and even themselves. As we saw with relief programs put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic—which included everything from student loan moratoriums to child tax credits and stimulus checks to rent relief and universal free school lunches—supporting people can dramatically improve their lives. 

In practice, a better net would strengthen the formal care system and make it more possible for families to outsource the help they need with caregiving through programs like free universal healthcare, eldercare, childcare, and education from early childhood through post-secondary school. Ideally, those programs would also be funded not only to a high level of quality but also to the level of sustainability—ensuring that caregivers are cared for, as well. At the same time, a better net would also strengthen the informal care system, allowing people to contribute more equitably to a shared project of unpaid caregiving by guaranteeing them universal paid family leave, ample paid vacation time, limits on paid work hours, and stipends for families with dependent-care responsibilities. And finally, a better net would also allow all people to live with dignity, regardless of their choices or their circumstances. It would raise the minimum wage, increase protections for paid workers and their unionizing efforts, ensure access to affordable food, housing, communication, transportation, and other basic necessities, and eliminate the punitive checks on “deservingness” we have built into the meager safety net we currently have. 

We got close to building key parts of this net with Build Back Better. ​And there’s no reason we couldn’t try again. 

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1.

Vicki Larson specializes in writing about living and loving outside conventional models of coupling and the nuclear family as well as busting ageist and sexist narratives about aging as a woman and women’s sexuality and desire. The former longtime lifestyles editor, writer and columnist for the Marin Independent Journal, her writing can also be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, The Huffington Post, Medium and elsewhere. Here, I ask her about her new book, LATitude: How You Can Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work. You may find more about her on her website https://www.vicki-larson.com, and follow her on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/OMGchronicles, Threads: https://www.threads.net/@omgchronicles?hl=en and Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/omgchronicles.

AMW: Why is the secret to stronger long-term relationships spending a healthy amount of time together and apart?

VL: I think famed Belgian psychotherapist and author Esther Perel said it best in her 2006 book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence—“separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.”

According to many who study romantic relationships, we have come to rely on our romantic partners to be our everything—best friend; soulmate; lover; co-parent; great communicator; romantic, intellectual, and professional equal; companion, and financial partner, and also provide us with happiness, fulfillment, financial stability, intimacy, social status and fidelity. More and more, however, we are seeing how unstainable that is in the long term. Many people are seeking out what’s been called OSO, other significant others—whether family members,  friends or other types of platonic relationships to fulfill some of those needs.

Research by David M. Frost, a psychologist and professor of population and family health at the Mailman School at Columbia University, indicates that it really doesn’t matter how physically close you are to your partner as long as each of you feels as close as you want to be, even if it isn’t close by other people’s desires.

As much as we may want to be close to our romantic partner, we also have agentic needs, meaning our sense of freedom, independence, and self-mastery. If closeness interferes too much with our agentic needs, it’s troubling for the relationship.

How much time together and apart is up to a couple to decide, hopefully a healthy balance that honors the desires of each person as well as the couplehood.

AMW: Why do you think that live apart together relationships have been making headlines and sparking online conversations in recent years? Why the sudden interest?

VL: LAT relationships have long existed and been studied in England and Europe, where they are more common, but they’ve garnered more attention recently in the States because of two things—the rise of so-called gray divorce and the pandemic lockdowns.

Divorced and widowed women in their 60s and older are overwhelmingly driving the live apart together lifestyle in part because they feel like they’ve “been there, done that” in previous heterosexual relationships and see LAT as a way to “undo gender.” They can enjoy the best of a committed, loving romantic relationship without having to give up their freedom. In fact, LAT relationships have been called the “gender revolution continuing into old age,” according to two Swedish researchers —a nod to the fact that baby boomer women have been on the forefront of restructuring family life in the past few decades, especially after no-fault divorce was written into law across the United States.

Also, the pandemic revealed the difficulties of living 24-7 with a romantic partner. Unable to go to work, school or other activities that got people out of the house for a few hours, it was the first time many couples experienced so much togetherness, and it felt suffocating for some. Too much closeness can negatively impact a relationship as well as each person’s well-being, research has shown. Then, some people had to sleep and live apart temporarily, such as health care workers who were caring for COVID patients or a family member who came down with COVID and had to isolate themselves to protect their loved ones, and some came to realize that they actually liked some time and space to themselves. So, an unplanned global event gave some couples a chance to experience a different way of being together.

AMW: What are the myths about live apart together couples?

VL: There are several, but one of the biggest is that LAT relationships are only for the wealthy. Except all romantic couples start off living in separate households, whether solo or with parents, friends, roommates, or some other configuration. Nothing about their living situation has to change just because they found someone they’re in love with. Yes, it’s cheaper to live together, but that’s turning a romantic decision into a financial decision.

Another myth is that LATs are more likely to cheat. It’s true—sometimes LATs cheat on their partner. But so do people who live together. It’s hard to know how many people fool around on their romantic partner—people aren’t always honest about such things— but since many more couples live together than live apart, it’s obvious that living together doesn’t prevent anyone from cheating.

Others look at all LAT couples as just dating, not as committed loving unions whether they’re married or not. Some people who live apart are indeed dating, but many are what have been called “partner LATs,” who are deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives, are executors of each other’s estates, have each other’s powers of attorney, etc.

Some see the lifestyle as being bad for the environment. It’s true that many housing units, whether a 250-square-foot studio or a 2,500-square-foot single-family house, have their own appliances, and heating and cooling systems, etc. All that has impacts on the environment.

More important, however, is how the people in those units actually live. If you’re a family of three or four in one household, yes, you are sharing resources and that can be better for the environment. But if that family often flies for work or vacations, drives gas-guzzling luxury cars, trucks or SUVs, dines on beef a few times a week and has remodeled their perfectly fine kitchen or bathroom to keep up with new decor trends, their carbon footprint will likely be much higher than that of a solo LAT dweller who lives minimally, perhaps walks, bikes, uses mass transit, or has an electric vehicle; shops at consignment and resale stores; and is vegetarian or vegan. Lifestyle matters.

Finally, many don’t believe that you can live apart and raise children together. But there are many children being raised with one parent at home and one who commutes for work and only comes back to the family home for short visits, or who is deployed overseas, or is incarcerated, or any configuration that keeps them apart for lengths of time. Plus, many people in platonic relationships co-parent in separate places as do divorced parents. All that matters is that the parents put their children’s needs—to feel safe, secure and loved—first. According to the research-based center Zero to Three, children need “parents who, whether living together or not, demonstrate respect for each other, communicate calmly and without anger, and who make their child’s needs the central focus of their decision-making.”

Vicki Larson is a longtime award-winning journalist, author of Not Too Old for That: How Women Are Changing the Story of Aging, coauthor of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists, and Rebels, and author of the upcoming book, LATitude: How You Can Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work. You may find more about her on her website https://www.vicki-larson.com, and follow her on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/OMGchronicles, Threads: https://www.threads.net/@omgchronicles?hl=en and Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/omgchronicles.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1.

In recent years, the feminist movement has made significant strides towards inclusivity and diversity, championing the rights and voices of women from varied backgrounds and experiences. However, as the conversation around intersectionality (how multiple identities interact to create unique experiences of discrimination) deepens, it becomes increasingly clear that certain groups remain on the peripheries of these conversations. Among these overlooked communities are women with intellectual disabilities, whose unique perspectives and challenges often go unheard within the discussion around feminism. While feminism prides itself on advocating for equality and justice for all women, the question arises: Is feminism truly inclusive if it fails to adequately represent and address the needs of disabled women?

Critiques of feminism’s inclusivity are not new. For decades, scholars and activists have pointed out the movement’s historical oversight of marginalized groups. Although recognition of intersectionality and the pioneering work of disabled Black feminists have significantly contributed to bridging this gap, there’s a prevailing sentiment that the broader feminist movement has yet to fully embrace women with intellectual disabilities. Their experiences with oppression are multifaceted and intersects with gender, disability, and oftentimes, other facets of identity, such as race and socioeconomic status, yet their voices are scarcely reflected in mainstream feminist dialogues.

We conducted a series of qualitative interviews with eight women with intellectual disabilities across the provinces of Alberta and Ontario, offering them a platform to voice their perspectives on feminism, whether they identify with the feminist movement; and if the issues significant to them are reflected within the broader conversations about feminism and feminist activism. Uniquely positioned at the intersection of disability studies and gender studies, our study stands out as the first of its kind to specifically center and elevate the insights of these women.

Our pilot study revealed striking disparities in terms of awareness and interpretations of feminism among the participants. For some participants, the concept of feminism was entirely new terrain. Erin, for instance, candidly admitted her unfamiliarity with the term, stating “I don’t know, I haven’t heard of it [feminism] before.” Conversely, others like Mariah possessed some grasp of feminism, explaining “Feminism means having the same rights as everyone and being treated though, like everyone should be treated equality or equally.”

Despite varying levels of familiarity with feminism as a construct and as a political movement, a common thread emerged: most participants had sought to enrich their understanding of feminism prior to the interview through the Internet or conversations with trusted individuals in their lives. For instance, Charlotte shared, “we went online and learned a little, a little bit about or did because I knew some of kind of what it is […] like, not sure I understood it at the beginning. But like my worker was able to explain it to me.” While these endeavors often led to a basic recognition of feminism’s advocacy for women’s rights equal to those of men, the depth of understanding remained varied.

Although many participants resonated with feminist principles of equality and justice, a deeper dive into feminism was not always a priority for participants. For some, this was explained as resulting from feeling excluded by mainstream feminist movements. This sentiment of being overlooked in mainstream feminism was a common thread, vividly illustrated by Erin’s call for the voices of disabled women to be acknowledged and respected within the feminist movement. “I know there’s a lot of girls that have disabilities, and it’s like, you know, they’re [feminists] ignoring us,” Erin lamented.

Interestingly, most participants – even those with a fuller understanding of feminism – did not label themselves as feminists. Instead, participants such as Kaitlyn shared her conviction in self-advocacy, which, in her view, aligns with feminist ideals. “I just like to stick up from our right and believe in myself and be the person I am,” she declared.  This could be explained because prior to this exploratory study, most participants were unfamiliar with the term “feminism” and instead opted to identify with organizations and movements that were inclusive of services, mobilization, and representation of women with intellectual disabilities. We speculate that although participants strive to achieve equality, they do not see feminist organizations as acknowledging or including their experiences.  

Nevertheless, through our discussions, most participants revealed their active engagement in feminist practices, showcasing how they champion their rights and those of others, even without formally identifying with the feminist movement. For example, Erin and Jennifer defined independence as a self-sufficient way of life, not confined by societal expectations or reliance on men. Jennifer expressed:

I guess you could say that I’m a strong I’m also independent. So, I’m very independent. I don’t. Well, I do depend on people, but I can get majority and around by myself […] this means like I’m strong on my own, like I don’t need that male support. Like some people are like they depend on the male to do everything.

The emphasis on independence reflects not only a desire for self-sufficiency but also the recognition of the power and necessity of voicing one’s needs and rights, especially in spaces where they might otherwise be overlooked. Ingrid’s experience exemplifies this dynamic interplay between personal agency and broader advocacy. As she navigates her role as a mother and an advocate, she confronts challenges that extend beyond her immediate circumstances, identifying systemic issues affecting women at large.

I’m advocating for my daughter too, because there’s things that I see that he doesn’t see. And I see it with women, too, there’s things that are things going on with women, and then when I say something, I get in trouble for it. But I’m still advocating for. If we don’t advocate for ourselves, nothing is going to be done.

Ingrid’s words not only highlight her commitment to advocacy but also illuminate the broader implications of her actions, which aim at fostering change not just for her daughter but for women experiencing similar struggles. Ingrid identified the collective struggle experienced by women, and illuminated the ways in which solidarity becomes a critical resource, offering emotional sustenance and a sense of community. According to Ingrid, having a robust network of women friends is invaluable:

Where if like if I’m down. I just reach out to my friends in the group that I have, and then they bring me back up. If they’re down. If they need to vent, they come to me, or they come to any of the people in our group.

This reciprocal support system not only empowers individuals like Ingrid but also reinforces the collective resilience of the group, enabling members to uplift each other through challenges and advocacy efforts.

Through the conversations we had with the women participating in our study, it was made clear that women with intellectual disabilities perceive feminism as both a personal and collective strength. They aspire to be recognized and included within the broader conversations about feminism, seeking to redefine the movement as one that fully embraces diversity and champions the rights of all women. This study reveals a profound need for the feminist movement to extend its embrace. By doing so, it will not only champion the rights of a wider constituency but also enrich its narrative with the diverse experiences of women with intellectual disabilities.

Authors:

Alan Santinele Martino, Assistant Professor, Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of Calgary. @AlanSMartino

Ann Fudge Schormans, Professor, School of Social Work, McMaster University

Arielle Perrotta, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary

Anna Couillard, Undergraduate Student, Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of Calgary

Clodagh Perras, Undergraduate Student, Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of Calgary

Molly Johnson, Undergraduate Student, Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of Calgary

In recent years, almost every month brings a new article in the New York Times, The Guardian, or other news outlets about the high percentage of young adults continuing to live with their parents. The popular perception is that adult children living at home have “failed to launch.” The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted living arrangements, putting “boomerang” young adults in the spotlight, who are perceived as failures but are frequently employed or only temporarily living at home. Recently, furious debates among The Guardian readers centered on whether and how much parents should charge their young adult children if they continue to live at home. Proponents argue that adult children should contribute to rent and expenses, while opponents contend that it is unfair to force struggling young adults to pay, especially if the parents own the house.

What happens when younger adults who are fresh out of college go back to their parental home? It has recently become more common for young adults to move back to their parents’ house. But for how many years? Staying in the parental household can help young adults recover after a financial hiccup, yet what happens if they stay too long? 

In our recent research, we seek answers to these questions and look at the consequences to young adults’ early careers when they live with their parents in the United States. We analyzed survey data to find answers.

We found that living at home with your parents is associated with men’s employment, but not women’s. This is likely because typical adult roles such as marriage and motherhood shape women’s life course differently than men. Also, women have slightly lower rates of living with their parents, and they tend to leave their parents’ house earlier than men. 

We show that almost half of young men in their late twenties live with their parents at some point in the US, and one in four continuously live with their parents between the ages of 24 and 29. Then we found that living with your parents short-term (about 1 year) is in fact associated with an improved likelihood of full-time employment. More so, living with your parents for 2 to 3 years has no association with full-time employment. However, living with your parents longer-term (four to six years) is negatively associated with occupational standing, a measure to rank prestige of an occupation. 

What about the conditions that predetermine the possibility of living with your parents? By the age of 24, young adults have experiences, like being married, divorced or parenthood among others, that could both affect their likelihood of returning to their parent’s home and also shape their employment outcomes at age 32. Using the strength of our data set, we control for many personality characteristics and experiences that may affect both employment outcomes and likelihood of returning to parental home. 

Although parental co-residence is often depicted as problematic for both parents and young adults in the media, our findings suggest otherwise. Parents of young men may be reassured by our findings that having your adult child live with you for up to four years is not associated with negative employment outcomes in men’s early 30s. In fact, a brief spell of moving back home with your parents may even yield some benefits. Our finding that one year of living with your parents has a positive association with employment outcomes suggests that parents continue to provide an important buffer for many men well into adulthood. However, the cautionary note that living with your parents for more than four years could have lasting negative consequences for their employment prospects might urge parents to reconsider allowing their adult sons to remain in their household for too long. 

Many social trends likely contribute to young men’s prolonged dependence on their parents, including rises in student debt and increasing housing costs. These issues are being addressed to some extent through recent efforts by the administration, such as student loan cancellation initiatives and they should continue to alleviate financial burdens on young adults. Moreover, we need to recognize that the transition to adulthood is extending into later years. Instead of demonizing this shift, we should highlight ways to adapt to and support these evolving living arrangements.

Asya Saydam is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and a Population Research Center (PRC) Graduate Research Trainee at the University of Texas at Austin. Asya’s research interests are at the intersection of family demography, gender, and work, with a specific focus on marital and household dynamics and health outcomes over the life course. You can follow them on Twitter @asyasaydam

Reprinted from the Council on Contemporary Families Brief Reports

A briefing paper prepared by Arielle Kuperberg, University of North Carolina – Greensboro,  Sarah Thébaud, University of California, Santa Barbara, Kathleen Gerson, New York University,  and Brad Harrington, Boston College, for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Gender Equality (PDF).

More dads were out of the labor force during the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before. In 2021, 15% of U.S. dads who lived with their children weren’t working, and weren’t actively searching for work – an all-time high (see Figure 1).   

Figure 1: Growth in Dads at Home, 1968-2022. Analysis of Current Population Survey Data, Yearly March Supplement, conducted using the ipums.org online data analyzer. Analysis includes all men living with their own children under age 18 at time of survey, and is nationally representative of the United States. Update and expansion of results previously published. Data analyzed by authors for Council on Contemporary Families. 

But according to them, it wasn’t because they were taking care of the kids. Only one-percent of dads who lived with their children in 2021 and 2022 (fewer than 1 of 10 dads out of the labor force) said they were not looking for a job because they were taking care of home and family. Instead, almost all of the recent growth in dads out of the workforce has been the result of an increase in those who report that they are “retired.” In 2000, 4.4% of dads living with their minor children were retired; by 2022, this had risen to 7.4%, accounting for about half of dads living with their children who were out of the labor force. 

The rise in retirement rates was a result of two trends. One is that fewer young men are having children. Recent PEW reports found that 63% of young men are single, and that birth rates have dropped to record lows. Our analysis of the Current Population Survey – March Supplement, a nationally representative annual survey of U.S. adults, found that in 2000, 44% of men in their 30s were not living with any of their own minor children – but by 2022 this number was almost 55%. We found rates of fatherhood are staying steady for men in their 40s and slightly growing among men in their 50s and 60s, so a larger share of dads are older.

Second, our analysis of the data found a growing share of even younger dads in their 50s, 40s, and even 30s say they are retired. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, more dads retired than usual, as health risks, lack of child care, and labor market upheavals drove many workers out of the paid workforce. Taken together, the increase in fathers out of the paid labor force are more a result of trends in fathers’ aging and retirement than changing ideas about gender, work and parenthood.

Figure 2: Fathers and Mothers Living with their own Children under Age 18, 2021. Authors’ Analysis of Current Population Survey – March Supplement Data.

But why aren’t more dads stepping up to stay home to care for home and family? After all, in an increasing number of families, including an increasing number of two-parent married families, mothers are the sole or “primary earners” (earning over 60% of the household income) for at least part of their children’s childhood. But while rates of moms staying home with kids have declined over time, we found that even when the proportion of dads out of the labor force reached peak rates in 2021, mothers living with their children were over ten times as likely as fathers living with their children to report they were home to take care of home and children(see Figure 2). 

Our collective research suggests that culturally entrenched ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, and breadwinning still shape gender differences in staying home to care for children. Although men value care, and society increasingly values fathers as caregivers, dads are still most strongly judged on their roles as workers and financial providers, limiting their ability to comfortably take on caring roles.

In research-in-progress on trait desirability for American men and women, Thébaud & colleagues find that, in one sense, people’s perspectives on masculinity do appear to beevolving: most people believe it is highly socially desirable for men, especially fathers, to be caring, supportive, family-oriented, kind, and affectionate. In fact, these traits were perceived to be just as desirable in men as other, more stereotypically masculine, attributes like competitiveness and risk-taking. However, they also found that this apparent desirability for men to be engaged in caregiving is overshadowed by an extremely strong and durable expectation that men prioritize work: being hardworking, ambitious, career-oriented, and a provider were rated as the most highly desirable attributes in men. 

Additional research by Harrington, Thébaud and colleagues further illustrates this duality in fatherhood expectations. In a study of more than a thousand working parents in professional occupations, more than three quarters would ideally prefer to share caregiving responsibilities equally with their spouse. But fewer than half were actually able to achieve that ideal in their day to day lives. Why? Workplace culture and expectations – especially the often taken-for-granted notion that the best workers are those who prioritize work over outside responsibilities – are one important culprit. That is, even when fathers would ideally like to share caregiving equally with their spouse, and even when they work in organizations that offer generous policies and benefits, the presence of intense work demands and expectations in their workplace can dramatically reduce their chances of achieving that ideal. 

Restrictive ideas about masculinity, gender and work also shape young people’s outlooks. In another study by Gerson, 120 millennials were interviewed about how they envisioned their work and family ties. She found that most men and women aspired to share paid work and caregiving in an egalitarian partnership, yet they were skeptical about the chances of achieving this goal. Men felt constrained by the need to put work first, which meant they looked to a partner to do most of the caregiving. Yet women did not share this view. They wished to avoid a “traditional” relationship that expected them to do most of childcare, even if that meant remaining single and either forgoing childbearing or bearing and supporting a child on their own. Such perspectives may explain recent declines in childbearing.  

The enduring expectation that fathers should prioritize work is apparent in how stay-at-home dads are viewed and treated. Research by Kuperberg and colleagues examining news articles about stay-at-home dads over 30 years indicates that while stigma surrounding stay-at-home dads has declined over time, dads who voluntarily choose to stay home with their kids are still described as being ridiculed, excluded, and socially isolated, receiving “strange looks” and “snide comments.” This persistent stigma may explain why out-of-work dads in their 30s, 40s, and 50s increasingly describe themselves as “retired,” but not “taking care of home and family.”

This kind of social environment – in which father’s caregiving is highly valued, but their employment and career devotion remains virtually non-negotiable – severely limits the range of options that parents face when it comes to figuring out how to best organize work and family responsibilities. 

To achieve gender equality in work and family roles, it seems clear that we need greater attention to fathers, fatherhood, and ideas about masculinity and work. The pandemic pushed more fathers to “retire” before their children were adults, and potentially take on more caretaking roles at home. Other research in this symposium also finds that remote work led to greater equality in home roles. As more dads gained experience with caretaking roles during the pandemic, and economic forces continue to shift, families may continue to rely on dads for childcare at higher rates, creating new possibilities for families. 

About the Authors

Arielle Kuperberg is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She can be reached at atkuperb@uncg.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @ATKuperberg.

Sarah Thébaud is Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She can be reached at sthebaud@ucsb.edu. Twitter: @sthebaud1.

Kathleen Gerson is Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts & Science at New York University. She can be reached at kathleen.gerson@nyu.edu. You can follow her on Twitter at @KathleenGerson.

Brad Harrington is a Research Professor and Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family. He can be reached at brad.harrington@bc.edu. You can follow him on Twitter @DrBradH.

Historically, women have been primary caregivers and responsible for domestic tasks, including housework and childcare. However, men have started to assume a more significant role in domestic work. Indeed, fathers’ direct involvement in parenting in the United States has increased since the 1960s. But even when both parents work outside the home, the division of labor at home remains unequal.

Research has suggested that one of the reasons for unequal division of labor is maternal gatekeeping. Mothers may serve as gatekeepers in the family—controlling fathers’ involvement in parenting by discouraging or encouraging their involvement. When mothers are more controlling about the ways fathers get involved with their children (gate closing), fathers tend to be less involved in terms of both quality and quantity. However, when mothers are more open and encouraging (gate opening), fathers tend to be more involved in taking care of their children. Maternal gatekeeping is important because it affects fathers’ involvement in childrearing, which is beneficial for children’s positive cognitive, language, and social-emotional development. We have relatively little understanding of psychological factors that may explain individual differences in mothers’ tendencies to encourage or discourage fathers from engaging in childcare and housework.

There are a few factors that seem to shape how much a mother controls a father’s involvement with children. First, mothers who believe strongly in traditional gender roles where women are responsible for domestic tasks and men are breadwinners of the family and the idea that certain traits, such as caring, are biologically inherent tend to be more controlling and to close the gate to fathers’ involvement. Mothers’ psychological well-being and expectations play a role, too. Mothers who struggle emotionally, have unrealistically high expectations for their partner’s parenting or feel their relationship is unstable tend to be more critical and controlling of fathers’ involvement. Also, fathers who doubt their parenting abilities may face more control from mothers. There is even evidence that mothers might control fathers more when fathers show high levels of negative emotions. This could be because some mothers use gatekeeping as a way to protect their children from fathers’ risky traits.

During periods of change like becoming a parent, individuals may experience higher stress because of changes in responsibilities and relationships. Relationships formed in the early years of life impact how individuals see themselves and others in relationships for their whole lives. These views about relationships are called attachment styles and they also influence personal beliefs about offering support when needed and whether someone deserves support. Attachment styles are marked by different levels of anxiety (i.e., worry about abandonment) and avoidance (i.e., discomfort with closeness) and affect the psychological adjustment of new parents to parental roles.

Our research was based on data drawn from a larger study of 182 dual-earner couples in the United States who were followed across their transition to parenthood during 2008–2010. The couples we studied completed surveys about attachment styles and maternal gatekeeping and were also observed interacting together with their infants. We found that more anxious mothers tended to exert more control (gate closing). Additionally, during caregiving tasks, more anxious mothers showed less encouragement of father involvement (gate opening), which was unexpected. This behavior might stem from anxious mothers wanting to protect their close bond with their children. These findings align with previous research on anxious attachment, which suggests that anxious individuals tend to regulate their relationships more tightly due to fear of abandonment.

Similarly, fathers who were more avoidant perceived less encouragement from mothers. Avoidant individuals typically create more distance in relationships, which might lead mothers to be less supportive of fathers’ involvement in parenting. Unexpectedly, fathers’ higher anxiety was also related to lower perceived encouragement from mothers and higher observed gate closing from mothers. This could be because mothers might hesitate to encourage fathers’ involvement to protect their investment in their children and hold their positions as ‘expert’ parents while fathers are considered as ‘apprentices’.

Overall, our findings indicated that more anxious mothers show less encouragement and more discouragement of fathers’ involvement. Also, fathers with higher anxiety and avoidance perceive less encouragement and more discouragement from mothers regarding their involvement in childcare. This study’s findings have important implications for programs aimed at supporting couples and parenting. By understanding how individual factors, such as adult attachment styles, influence parenting dynamics during the transition to parenthood, interventions can be tailored to encourage better cooperation between parents and greater support from mothers for fathers’ involvement in parenting. This support can lead to fathers feeling more empowered to make parenting decisions and to have higher confidence in their parenting abilities. These positive outcomes for fathers can ultimately benefit children, as their development can be enriched by having actively involved fathers.

F. Kubra Aytac is a PhD candidate in Psychology at The Ohio State University. Her primary research interests are adult attachment, coparenting, couple relationships, and mental health. You can follow her on Twitter @kubraytac

The study discussed in this blog is published in Personal Relationships. I would like to recognize my advisor and co-author, Dr. Sarah J. Schoppe-Sullivan.

Reprinted from NBC News

Dear Readers, as we enter wedding season, enjoy this reprint of an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She is the author of five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage and the forthcoming, For Better AND Worse: The Problematic Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.

Couples who follow stereotypical ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict.

It’s July, which means wedding season, especially in America. And few events in modern life are wrapped in as much “tradition” as engagements and weddings — especially for heterosexual couples. Surprise proposals from men on bended knees; diamond rings; virginal white dresses with flowing trains; proud fathers walking glowing daughters down the aisle to waiting grooms.

Not all traditions match modern tastes, of course. Instead of a cake, for example, it was customary in the Middle Ages to serve a “bride pye” at wedding celebrations. The earliest recorded recipe for such a pie included lamb testicles, oysters, sweetbreads, fruit, butter, egg yolks and lemon.

While many of the rituals we embrace today — or have thrust on us by wedding planners — sound more palatable, they too can leave a bad aftertaste, especially when they reinforce the notion that marriage is the biggest day in a woman’s life and becoming a wife the most important identity she will ever acquire. You see, even when we “just play” at stereotypes, we absorb some of them — and they affect other people’s expectations of us. Studies show, for example, that when a woman is described to people as a wife, rather than, say, a friend or colleague, they expect her to take major responsibility for cleaning, even if they know she works full-time. They hold a “wife” to higher standards of cleanliness than a man or a single woman, even a cohabiting one, and judge her more harshly when she doesn’t meet those standards.

While many of the rituals we embrace today — or have thrust on us by wedding planners — sound more palatable, they too can leave a bad aftertaste,

Far be it for me to suggest that women give up white dresses, dispense with the father-daughter dance, or even challenge the convention that the man must surprise the woman with an elaborate proposal. Still, it’s worth updating some of these traditions or seeking out others that offer more realistic visions of the marital partnership most couples now hope to establish.

To craft a wedding that takes the best of different traditions and integrates those with the values of contemporary couples, it helps to reflect on where those traditions came from, when they came into being and what alternative traditions they pushed aside. Take the custom of the man asking the woman’s father for her hand in marriage, a tradition that wedding industry analysts claim has recently come back in style.

For most of recorded history, this was not just a polite gesture. In ancient empires and in medieval Europe, a woman who accepted a marriage proposal without her father’s permission could be beaten and imprisoned until she changed her mind. In 16th-century Europe, governments could dissolve any match made without the consent of either partner’s father. Any child born before the marriage was invalidated was thereby rendered illegitimate — becoming a “filius nullius,” or child of no one, legally entitled to nothing. In 18th-century New England, a man who “insinuated” himself into a woman’s affections without permission from her father could be whipped.

The tradition of the father “giving” the bride to the groom reflects the fact that until the middle of the 19th century, marriage permanently transferred legal authority of a woman from her father to her husband. An unmarried woman could escape her father’s control over her finances only once she turned 21. But in the 1950s and ’60s the majority of women married before turning 21, and for them the transfer from father to husband meant they never became fully adult in the eyes of the law. Until the mid-1970s, a wife still needed her husband’s permission to take out a loan, sign a lease, open a business or even apply for a credit card.

Some couples have modernized this ritual by asking both sets of parents to approve the match and get to know each other as in-laws. In one marriage I attended, the bride and groom, accompanied by their entire families, walked to meet each other, and then the couple proceeded together to face the officiant.

Such modifications actually draw on a very different, and even more ancient, marital tradition. Among the earliest hunting and gathering bands of the Paleolithic world, and still today among some of their descendants, marriage was a way of turning strangers into relatives. Weddings were about creating ever-widening relationships and mutual obligations among new in-laws and neighboring communities. At my son’s wedding, he and his bride “gave” both sets of parents away to each other, having us exchange leis to symbolize our commitment to the new network of relatives we had acquired.

Many of the most popular “traditional” wedding customs today actually come from a small sliver of history when women were bring pushed out of their central roles in economic and social life and offered idealization of their beauty and purity as (rather scant) compensation. The gasp of surprise, pretended or not, when presented with a ring; the emphasis on the size of the ring and the beauty of the bridal gown, the father walking the bride to the waiting groom, and later the groom lifting her over the threshold — all these rituals come from a time when women had to rely on men to take the initiative in all things and hope that their husbands would provide for them.

That’s not how medieval and early modern Europeans regarded marriage. Everyone knew that a man could not run a farm or business on his own, and in colonial America it could be hard for a man to get a license to open an inn unless he had a wife to be his co-worker. Wives were sometimes called “yoke-mates.” The old German wedding custom of Baumstamm sägen nicely sums up the idea that marriage depends on the woman’s contributions as well as the man’s. There, the first thing a bride and groom do after the ceremony is to each take hold of one end of a cross-cut saw and vigorously saw the log in half to demonstrate they can work together.

The word “Mrs.” was originally derived from the female equivalent of the title “master.” It designated a “mistress” — a woman “who governs” — whether married or unmarried. Only in the 19th century, at the height of what historians call “the cult of female domesticity,” did “Mrs.” came to indicate a woman’s marital status rather than her socioeconomic status. And that marital status was considered far more important than any of her individual achievements. Women increasingly lost even their first names when they wed, becoming only “Mrs. John Smith.”

Women’s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine.

A name was not all women lost. As the perceptive French writer Alexis de Tocqueville explained, 19th-century American women “irrevocably” surrendered their legal independence and access to public life once they entered the bonds of matrimony. When one man heard that his childhood friend was engaged, he confided to his diary that the “idea of her being married seems to me much the same as her being buried.” Many women recorded similar fears in their own diaries.

Women’s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine. When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, her ornate white wedding dress with its long train created a sensation. Being a real queen, Victoria had to propose to Albert, a piece of pageantry that few women have adopted even now. But copying Victoria’s wedding dress — and later the three-tiered white wedding cakes that were introduced at her daughters’ weddings — was a different matter.

It’s often suggested that the white wedding dress caught on because it stood for purity, signaling that the bride had protected her maidenhood until the ceremony. But probably more important was its role as a uniquely female status symbol in a world where women could no longer become entrepreneurs or “mistresses” in their own right. Dresses with trains at least three yards long were what women wore when in attendance at the royal court, and white was the color debutantes wore when presented to the queen. The fact that white dresses were expensive to make and exceptionally difficult to keep clean in a world where rooms continually accumulated soot from fireplaces and most streets were unpaved only added to their cachet. As Bride’s Magazine put it in 1949, wearing such a dress could make a woman “queen of the day, surrounded by your ladies-in-waiting.”

Fifty years ago, wedding rituals that reinforced stereotypes of men as protectors and providers and women as delicate homebodies worked well for many couples. As late as the 1970s and ’80s, couples who followed stereotyped gender scripts after marriage reported higher relationship satisfaction than couples who experimented with nontraditional arrangements such as shared breadwinning, housework and childcare. But today, egalitarianism is an increasingly important predictor of marital satisfaction. The good news is that in marriages formed since the early 1990s, couples who share child care and housework equally report the highest relationship and sexual satisfaction. The bad news is that couples who follow traditional ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict. So couples looking for happiness in the years after their wedding day might consider updating old ceremonies, or crafting new ones, that reinforce their commitment to equality from Day One.

Stephanie Coontz is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage” and is Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her new book, For Better AND Worse: The Problematic Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, is forthcoming in 2025.

Everyone’s relationships are different, with diverse goals, intentions, behaviors, and structures. Interviews with sexual minority, cisgender women (whom we’ll refer to as LGB+ women from now on) left us reflecting about how we can all, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, think more expansively about sex, relationships, and sexual health.

Young LGB+ women are often left out of the picture by researchers and medical professionals  when it comes to sexual health- even though they’re actually at increased risk for getting sexually transmitted infections and becoming unintentionally pregnant. Similarly, LGB+ women are often left out of the picture when we talk about sex and relationships, because so many of the messages we receive about romantic and sexual relationships focus on straight couples and families. Whether we’re aware of it or not, that messaging can influence how we act in our own relationships with our partners. This is sometimes referred to as heteronormative sexual scripts.

What we wanted to find out:

Since heteronormative sexual scripts are pervasive and often unavoidable, we wanted to learn more about how these scripts show up for LGB+ women in their sexual relationships. Thus, our recent study, Queering LGB+ Cisgender Women’s Sexual Health Scripts, explored these questions: How do heteronormative sexual scripts show up in LGB+ women’s sexual relationships and health promotion decisions? If heteronormative sexual scripts do not appear in their relationships, how do LGB+ women construct sexual health scripts that are grounded in their experiences as LGB+ women?

What we did:

To answer our questions, we interviewed 22 LGB+ women about their decision-making processes when it came to their sexual health and relationships (like preventing STIs, condom use, and birth control). Our goal with these interviews was not to say that our sample reflects the sexual experiences or decisions of all LGB+ women. Rather, we used interviews to better understand a shared, lived experience more in-depth, which we can use to inform other research, social and medical policy, or relationship education. We got to listen to LGB+ women tell us about their relationship experiences so we could share the meaningful patterns with others as family and relationship scientists.

Finding 1: Redefining Sex

The women in our sample all discussed expansive definitions of sex. Participants’ definitions of sex included many components such as individual pleasure, sexual behaviors beyond penile/vaginal intercourse (e.g., touching, oral sex, sex toy use), and a focus on altruism and partner pleasure. In other words, re-defining sex had less to do with the “what” (i.e., behaviors) and more to do with the “why” (motivations, like promoting a partner’s pleasure). In this way, LGB+ women moved beyond heteronormative sexual scripts (which would say that sex really boils down to penile-vaginal intercourse) and thought creatively and expansively about what sex can look and feel like.

Finding 2: Leaning into Trust

A second pattern we noticed was that many women talked about establishing trust with potential partners as part of health promotion strategies. Through conversation, STI testing, or just getting to know their partner, they learned that they were able to trust partners to protect their sexual health. This new sexual script contrasted with a heteronormative script, which would tell us that women often act as gatekeepers around potential sexual partners who can’t be trusted. By instead falling back on trust, LGB+ women also enacted agency in their relationships, often sitting in the driver’s seat of their own sexual health decisions. (This was the case regardless of whether participants were partnered to someone of the same or a different gender.)

Finding 3: Thinking Inside and Outside the Box about Safer Sex

We also asked women about using barriers like condoms or dental dams (which are used for oral sex) to prevent STI transmission or pregnancy. Interestingly, while our participants often talked about using condoms to prevent unintended pregnancy, women did not often did not discuss using condoms as STI prevention during interviews. Centering pregnancy prevention over STI prevention is a common heteronormative sexual script. Emphasizing pregnancy prevention  also carried over into conversations about dental dams, which women did not embrace or discuss favorably (often categorizing them as unaffordable, uncomfortable, or inaccessible). Basically, if the barrier didn’t directly prevent pregnancy like condoms, it wasn’t endorsed by LGB+ women. However, women also used creative, expansive health promotion strategies like washing hands and sex toys, or urinating before or after sex with partners. In that way, LGB+ women moved beyond the idea that a barrier method is the only way to practice safer sex.

Takeaways

All in all, LGB+ women’s stories taught us that their relationships and sexual health promotion strategies are creative, expansive, and reflect their own needs and goals. Although some beliefs about sexual health were influenced by dominant heterosexual relationships and scripts (for example, a focus on pregnancy prevention over STI prevention), LGB+ women teach us that there are ways to think with and beyond what we’re told when it comes to our sexual health and relationships.

Mari Tarantino, M.S. (she/her) is a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech studying Human Development and Family Science. Her research focuses on sexually, gender, and romantically marginalized individuals in partnerships and family contexts, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives on LGBTQ+ health. Her dissertation research will explore how transgender men and their partners make decisions about HIV prevention strategies. You can follow her on Twitter @mari_tarantino

Rose Wesche, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on how diverse interpersonal relationships, including friendships, romantic relationships, and casual sexual relationships, are associated with adolescents’ and young adults’ well-being. Rose uses diverse statistical methodologies and theoretical perspectives to examine how interpersonal relationships create risks and benefits related to health. You can follow her on Twitter @RoseWesche