The night after the presidential election, I went to a “brainstorming and prayer” session held in an evangelical church where I am conducting research. Church members felt it was important to come together in a season of transition for the church and the nation, both of which are experiencing a change in leadership. I sat in a circle of parishioners, notebook and pen in my lap. The first person to speak was a retired aeronautical engineer. The white, straight, 65 year-old veteran sighed in relief and bowed his head as he said “I can sleep again at night now.”

Church members discussed renewed feelings of job security. They prayed for those within their church and for the empty seats they would soon fill. They rejoiced in their happiness for what is happening in the country. One woman prayed, “We can elect a pastor, and we can elect a president, but we already have a KING.” None of the conversations focused on Trump’s religious values. Trump’s appeal lay in his secular ability to advocate for them so that they can, in turn, continue to do the work important to them as active evangelicals.

 Their prayers and hopes for the next four years reminded me of Arlie Hochschild’s recent work in rural Louisiana, where she uncovered what she calls the deep story of disenfranchised rural tea-party supporters. She suggests that Donald Trump might provide what she calls a “secular rapture” for many in the United States who feel as though their economic and social world is changing. Hochschild argues that the sense of being invisible and forgotten she witnessed among white working and middle-class individuals might indeed be a major factor in Trump’s appeal.

President-elect Donald Trump had the largest share of evangelical votes of any presidential candidate. My current research suggests that members of the evangelical community feel as though they live in a different world than many of us—a world in which they perceive themselves as losing their voice (see here, here, and here). Given those feelings of disenfranchisement, what appeal did a presidential candidate with unclear, and often seemingly un-Christian values hold?

I ask this question as a nonreligious individual researching evangelicals—I think many others ask it too. People ask me what it is like to be a woman, a feminist academic, and nonreligious in these spaces, spaces in which evangelizing is the point. My first response to those queries is that my gender identity does not matter much to those I study. My religious identity—and lack of one—matters much more to them. The reason for the salience of my nonreligious identity is perhaps similar to the reasons we saw such a large evangelical voter turnout.

In my larger research project on gender and sexuality within the evangelical church, I find evidence for what I call an imagined secular heterosexuality. Members of this church community discuss and debate married life and family life in relation to, and against, what they perceive to exist in an outside secular world. These conversations transcend concerns and understandings of life in the home. As an outside member of the secular world, I am seen not only as a researcher, but also as someone who can bridge a gap between their world and the secular world in which they no longer feel they have a voice.

There’s overlap between what I call the imagined secular and what Hochschild predicted as a secular rapture. Both terms highlight a strongly felt divide in the United States. Where evangelicals feel they are living in a separate world—one in which their economic, political, and social needs and beliefs are silenced—Trump may provide the voice they want back. And whether we speak of tea party supporters in rural Louisiana or ardent evangelicals in suburban Washington state, we must attend to the intersections of whiteness, religion, and felt disenfranchisement to understand the evangelical voter turnout we witnessed, and what that turnout now means for the upcoming moral, religious and political debates our country faces.

Sarah Diefendorf is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, where she researches constructions of gender and sexuality in religious communities. You can find more of her work here: www.sarahdief.com

When a person is sent to prison they leave a community behind. And few of the studies of mass incarceration in the U.S. examine the prison system and families. Consider, for example, how incarceration triggers the termination of an incarcerated parent’s parental rights.

What is the extent of the problem? Data on the punitive impact of child welfare policies on families of incarcerated parents are either overly broad or just plain old and outdated. For example, some of the most recent research states that there are between 29,000 and 51,000 children in foster care who have incarcerated parents. But seek more information and the picture gets hazy. More research, even just constructing a database from data kept in separate state systems, would help.

I discovered this when I started to study the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act. From 1995, before the Act, to 2004 adoption rates in the U.S. doubled. This may be due to the financial incentives offered by the federal government to states that had increased their number of adoptions. But the provision in the Act stating that if a child has been in state care (i.e. foster care) for 15 of the last 22 months the state must move to terminate the parent’s parental rights has had a harsh effect on incarcerated parents, leading to untold numbers of family termination.

You see, non-incarcerated parents (“outsiders”) have access to exemptions to the time-based termination provisions. For instance, outsiders, who can regularly visit their child, are empowered to use that as evidence of connection. But incarcerated parents are not in control of whether or not they see their child.

The Act’s time limit provisions that trigger adoption were passed at the same time that incarceration rates were growing. The War on Drugs that began in the 1970’s turned drug abuse, which was once a public health issue, into a law enforcement issue. Cue the rise of mandatory minimums. In the early years of mandatory minimums, possession of five grams of crack cocaine (a drug that happened to be more common in low-income areas, which often have a large minority population) got you a minimum of five years.

Today, under federal policy 100 grams of a substance containing heroin results in a mandatory minimum of five years. However, if a defendant meets certain criteria (e.g. fully cooperated with the government and is a first time offender, etc.) they could get a reduced sentence. Yet, even a reduced sentence would still be between twenty-four to thirty months. If parental rights are challenged when a child is in state care 15 of the last 22 months, and the mandatory minimum is five years (24 to 30 months if you’re lucky) what chances have these policies given families?

As of March 2016 2.3 million people were in some form of corrections facility in the United States. New policies, aiming to create more reasonable sentencing laws, have been introduced in Congress such as the Mandatory Minimum Act of 2015. However, such bills still need to get through the House, the Senate, and the President. Given the uncertainty of the President elect’s intentions, and the clear racial animosity he and his coalition have displayed throughout his campaign, sentencing reform is now precarious. Meanwhile families remain and continue to become separated. Early commentary suggests that sentencing reform is dead. My question is what steps, if any, will we take to help mend the families separated due to the combination of The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and unabated mass incarceration? Because it is clear that mass incarceration is family policy.

Megan Peterson is a senior sociology major at Framingham State University and a Council on Contemporary Families Public Affairs and Social Media Intern.

Re-posted from Urban Wire

Worldwide, only about one in two women work, compared with three in four men. In some low-income countries, such as Zimbabwe and Madagascar, the labor force participation rate for women has reached 90 percent, but these women are often underemployed. Hard economic circumstances often force them to be self-employed or work in small enterprises that are unregulated and unregistered.

About 83 percent of all domestic workers in the world are women, most of whom work in precarious conditions. Women also do much more unpaid work than men, including caring for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities; contributing to family farms or businesses; and performing household chores such as collecting water or gathering firewood. Improving women’s livelihoods constitutes basic human rights protection.

But could including more women in the labor force also stimulate economic growth, enhance business competitiveness, and improve well-being?

We recently conducted a review of evidence to answer that question and found that reducing the gender pay gap and equalizing access to economic opportunities and resources are good for economic, social, and business development. For example, some firms that purposefully reduced gender discrimination and supported family-friendly policies attracted more talented workers, improved retention rates, and decreased employee stress, resulting in enhanced productivity.

But women face significant barriers to improving their lives, such as fear of victimization and violence, lack of child care, and legal and informal discrimination. Removing those barriers could help draw women into higher-productivity sectors and improve family, community, and national prosperity.

We found evidence that broad-based and gender-specific policies can enable women’s economic empowerment; that is, improving women’s ability to make decisions and affect outcomes important to themselves and their families. Here are six of those policies.Broad-based policies

Broad-based policies

• Promote economic growth: In countries experiencing rapid economic growth, increasing demand for labor and the availability of better-paying jobs ensures that women’s economic empowerment does not become a zero-sum game between men and women. When the economy demands more workers, women will not replace men if more women participate in the labor market.
• Invest in public services, infrastructure, and women-friendly public spaces and transportation: The quality of and access to public services, including basic utilities such as water and sanitation, improves all-around well-being through greater economic productivity and growth, but may be especially beneficial for women. For example, because women do most household work, electricity and tap water can free up their time, enabling greater labor market participation. Access to speedy and reliable transportation can reduce safety concerns that discourage women from entering the labor force or limit them to working at home.
• Promote innovation and technology: Information and communications technology can help increase women’s inclusion in the economy, particularly in high-productivity service sectors. Greater access to information and technology can also stimulate changes in social norms and attitudes toward women’s roles in society, potentially improving access to education and political involvement.

Gender-specific policies

• Provide child care: Evidence suggests that the availability of child care is strongly associated with an increase in women’s labor force participation and productivity. Child care, particularly high-quality child care, is one of the most important enablers of women’s economic empowerment and can have a positive impact on children’s learning.
• Change laws that limit women’s economic independence: Reforming inheritance and family law to lift prohibitions on daughters’ legacies and to reduce husbands’ power over wives’ economic activity can have positive economic effects, going beyond the specific outcomes they are intended to address.
• Improve or reduce work in the informal sector: Women are concentrated in the informal sector, which includes jobs that are unregulated and insecure, like street vending. Policies designed to move workers from the informal sector to the formal sector can significantly benefit women. Working in the formal economy is more likely to empower women because it is associated with more control over their own incomes than they would have in informal work. Evidence suggests that strengthening the collective bargaining capacity of women workers in this sector and improving awareness of women’s rights is important to ensuring that income levels and working conditions improve in the formal economy.

Enacting these policies will not only empower women, but will also benefit their families and communities. The United Nations’ recently formed High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment will bring needed attention to these issues and, we hope, begin to bring about needed change.

Elizabeth H. Peters is a Council on Contemporary Families Board Member, Director of the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, and coeditor of the book Marriage and Family: Perspectives and Complexities. 

Why are families less economically secure today? After all, there’s been four decades of families seeming to have the opportunity to earn more and do better—this largely due to women’s movement into the U.S. workforce. According to a new report, women’s increased earnings and hours have been vital in the American family’s search for economic security. How has that search gone? Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul’s new report “Women have made the difference for family economic security” offers some answers.

Boushey, Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and research team member Vaghul used data from the Current Population survey to focus on changes in family income between 1979 and 2013 for low-, middle-, and professional-income families. They delved into the difference between men’s and women’s earnings regarding greater pay, as well as women’s earning as a function of more hours worked. They also looked at other sources of income between 1979 and 2013.

Boushey and Vaghul had three main findings:

• Low income families lost, while middle income and professional families gained. “Between 1979 and 2013, on average, low-income families in the United States saw their incomes fall by 2.0 percent. Middle-income families, however, saw their incomes grow by 12.4 percent, and professional families saw their incomes rise by 48.8 percent.”
• In all social classes, women’s hours of paid work increased. “Over the same time period, the average woman in the United States saw her annual working hours increase by 26.4 percent. This trend was similar across low-income, middle-class, and professional families.”
• Women’s contributions saved the day for low and middle income families. “Across all three income groups, women significantly helped family incomes both because they earned more per hour and worked more per year. Women’s contributions saved low-income and middle-class families from steep drops in their income.”

What about men? Between 1979 and 2013 men’s earnings fell while women increased both their working hours and pay per hour. That made women’s growing movement into the workforce even more important. Women’s work meant that the average annual income for low income families rose by $1,929, $8,948 for middle-class families, and $20,274 for professional families.

By pointing to women’s dramatic increases in hours worked and wages as well as men’s surprising decline in those same areas, Boushey and Vaghul demonstrate that women’s time at work make all the difference –across all income groups.

It is about finding time. While women’s entry into the workforce has significantly changed the make-up of family incomes, the U.S. still lacks proper policies to make such work manageable for families. The pressure being placed on workers to manage their family while making enough money to support them is examined in detail in Heather Boushey’s new book, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict.

Originally posted May 17, 2016

Molly McNulty is a CCF public affairs intern at Framingham State University. She is a joint Sociology and Education major.

Re-posted from The Conversation

Even after mounting evidence of Donald Trump’s exploitative and demeaning treatment of women, his standing in the polls still hovers above 40%. On the face of it that’s more than a little shocking – but less surprising is the gender split among his supporters.

A recent summary of gender differences in the polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight found that women favour Trump’s female opponent, Hillary Clinton, by 15 percentage points overall; men, on the other hand, favour Trump by five. It’s true that many Republican women are standing by their man, but that’s not enough for Trump to win women’s vote overall.

No surprise at all to gender researchers, though, is that the first time a woman threatens to break through what Clinton called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” of the US presidency, her nominated opponent is the embodiment of the “male chauvinist pig” – a man, usually in a position of power, who publicly expresses the opinion that women are by nature inferior to men and best relegated to the kitchen and the bedroom.

The term male chauvinism first emerged after World War II as more women entered paid employment. This threatened the self-esteem many men derive from their dominance over women in the family, the economy, and society at large.

The use of the term chauvinist pig became more widespread as women in the US demanded not just employment, but the employment equality supported by affirmative action and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The epithet was in vogue during the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of second wave feminism.

Since then, many American men have adapted to women’s economic gains. They are much more likely to be married to employed women than to women who aren’t in the labour force. Men spend twice as much time doing unpaid housework and childcare as they did in the 1960s, and generally report more egalitarian attitudes to survey researchers.

Yet these gender equality gains are modest and fragile. Men’s masculine identity is still linked to their economic role, and a man’s chauvinist pig can resurface if this is threatened. But not all men are equally vulnerable to this threat.

Across the divide

All workers shared in the prosperity of the postwar era – but things began to change in the late 1970s, when wage inequality among men rose sharply in ways that affect their economic advantage over women.

Wage returns on a university degree steadily increased for both women and men, but the gender gap remains largest at the top of the wage distribution. In other words, the wage gains of high-skilled women are not likely to threaten the masculinity of high-skilled men. In contrast, the gender wage gap has almost disappeared among the least-skilled men and women.

Low-skilled men’s wages stagnated as the US de-industrialised and the real value of the minimum wage declined. Collectively-bargained, high-wage manufacturing jobs evaporated; they were replaced by precarious, low-wage service sector positions. The upshot is that a couple or family could not survive for long on a low-skilled husband’s income alone.

The men most affected by this transformation are now lining up for Trump like no other segment of the electorate. As reported by The Atlantic back in March 2016, white men without a college degree form the core of Trump’s supporters.

Without economic advantage, a man’s inner chauvinistic pig can break out to reassert dominance over women in another way. One way is to objectify women, as Trump was recorded doing with Billy Bush in 2005. Trump’s coarse comments may have scared away some of the Republican mainstream, but plenty of his supporters have dismissed them as typical masculine “locker-room talk” (a defence even shock-jock Howard Stern rejected).

Male chauvinists also use the state to assert their dominance over women. An example of this among a fair number of Trump supporters is the Twitter feed #repealthe19th – a cry to repeal the amendment that gave women the right to vote.

But women did not principally cause the economic woes that have left some voters so desperate as to think a chauvinist like Trump can save them. Indeed, it’s precisely men like Trump who have used their power and privilege to widen the gap between the haves and have nots.

Trump’s chauvinism will never make America greater than it is right now. Instead, his campaign has revealed just how damaging male chauvinism can be. And now, with his hyper-masculinity threatened by Clinton’s edge in the polls, Trump is attacking the very democratic process a presidential candidate should passionately defend.

Assuming that not even Donald Trump can destroy American democracy, the real challenge begins for whoever is sworn in as president on January 20 2017. Americans need more economic security for their enlightened sides to shine through again. This means more good jobs at living wages for men as well as women. Only then can the country begin to close the social chasms revealed and fuelled by Trump’s campaign – and only then can we banish chauvinism to the past, where it belongs.

Lynn Prince Cooke is a Council on Contemporary Families senior scholar, a professor of Social Policy at The University of Bath, and author of the book Gender-Class Equality in Political Economies.

So, things change. In March, Stephanie Coontz commented on the popular concern that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had been “leading young couples astray” through their premarital cohabitation and childbirth, pointing to Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) research that has demonstrated that both premarital cohabitation and having a baby before marriage actually don’t make a couple more likely to divorce than those who begin their families after marriage. Research has shown that the concern about premarital cohabitation addressed by Coontz in her 2016 revised and updated book, The Way We Never Were, has abated – Americans now hold more favorable views about cohabitation.

Nonetheless, Jolie and Pitt did divorce later this year, though probably not due to their pre-marital cohabitation. Pitt’s divorce is, remarkably, a “gray divorce.” Media coverage concerning gray divorce, or divorce of those over 50, has given the floor to CCF scholars to set the record straight about divorce, a trend about which the general public is becoming less accepting: the percentage of respondents to the National Survey of Family Growth who said that “divorce is usually the best solution when a couple who can’t seem to work out their marriage problems” declined by almost 9 percent for women and 5 percent for men, to 38 percent and 39 percent, respectively, between 2002 and 2011-2013. These beliefs are reflected in practice, too: couples who married in the twenty-first century have lower divorce rates than those who married earlier. (Keep in mind: fewer people marry these days.)

But gray divorce is becoming more common. Today, it’s estimated that 15 percent of people over 50 have been divorced, and that almost 25 percent of divorces in the United States are between people over age 50. When put in historical perspective, this shouldn’t be surprising: Vicki Larson of Quartz recently wrote,

Our current contract—“until death”—might have worked when people didn’t live all that long (according to the American [historian] and author Stephanie Coontz, the average marriage in colonial times lasted under 12 years); or when many women died in childbirth, freeing men to marry multiple times (which they did); and when men of means needed women to cook, clean and caretake, and women needed men for financial security. But that isn’t why we marry nowadays.

In an article about Sarah Jessica Parker’s new HBO program Divorce, CCF historian Steven Mintz pointed out in Time that the freedom to divorce has long been an American ideal, whose justification can be traced to the ideology of the American Revolution. Ronald Reagan, a famous conservative, helped to change divorce laws so that people could do so when they had “irreconcilable differences,” according to Stephanie Coontz.

Vicki Larson of Quartz suggested, in light of a longer history of divorce in the United States and more recent social changes such as increasing life expectancy and gender equality, that it might be appropriate for us to “rethink ‘until death’ [do us part].”

Braxton Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.

Revisiting a NICE WORK column at Girlwpen, written in 2012 during the last presidential campaign.

What to do when I read a study that so appeals to my worldview that I want to shout it out? Should I just kinda act cool, not let on that I wanna say, I knew it! See? SEE?!!!! That is how it is. We all have biases and preferences and a worldview that shape how we process information. And we all have choices about what to do with them. And that brings me to a study about how dudes in traditional marriages have traditional views that influence their judgments at work, too.

In a new working paper called “Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace” (.pdf), three business school professors investigate why, despite notable progress, the gender revolution appears to have “petered out.”  (An accessible overview of just this puzzle from the Council on Contemporary Families is in Gender Revolution? Or Not So Much.)

The new paper is novel: it asked, is it is possible that there are well-placed pockets of resistance in the workplace that help account for impeded progress? The authors hypothesized that, perhaps, men in cross-sex marriages with stay-at-home wives might have a different view of women in the workplace than married men with full-time working wives.

They hypothesized correctly. In particular, they found that (1) men in traditional marriages (MITM) had more negative attitudes towards working women (controlling for selection!); (2) MITM perceived the workplace as running less smoothly when more women worked there; (3) MITM also found more gender-egalitarian organizations less attractive; and (4) MITM, when asked to rate the quality of workers who were exactly equivalent, rated women lower than men. They controlled for selection (or the way it might be that sexist guys at work choose traditional marriages rather than guys being influenced by their traditional marriages to have traditional views at work) and for education (more educated guys espouse more ostensibly feminist views).

The study excited me because it provided support for that sinking feeling that some of us can have when working with guys who lead traditional private lives. At work, it can seem, they just don’t “get it.” Hard to put one’s finger on it. But they keep doing stuff like thanking their wives for all they do at home, thinking that this shows their respect for women.

The study also excited me because it was an example of the kind of research that I was talking about when I wrote about the neglect of men as focal points for research on gender, and my suspicion that the neglect stems from a sneaky sensibility that men’s vantage point is natural and therefore can go without examination. But without investigating the impact traditional marriages on work practices (instead of the more common investigation of egalitarian marriages on home practices), we are at risk of naturalizing “traditional” just as we naturalize “men.” To understand how gender operates, it helps to look at men at the center of power not just those at the margins. And this study did so.

Perhaps now you see the irony that I felt when I noticed my enthusiasm. The study shows how worldview lines up with personal life. This might influence your judgment at work. Back in the day, feminists said the personal is political. Thing is, the personal is political for everyone, including those who follow conventions. Even for those who don’t believe in this stuff. That means the personal is political, too, for MITM (the M is silent, by the way).

Re-posted from The Washington Post

Older generations always seem to fret about the sexual behavior and romantic lives of the younger crowd. In the 1920s, there was alarm when boys stopped visiting in the parlor and started driving girls around in what one newspaper called “a house of prostitution on wheels.” This worry paled in comparison to the panic evoked by the rowdy sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s.

In the 1980s, observers were rightly alarmed by the growing prevalence of early teen sex, AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. In the first two decades of this century, anxiety shifted to the college hookup scene and the emergence of dating apps to facilitate casual sex.

Recently, however, a new concern has surfaced, with the finding that young adults, those age 20 to 24, are now having less sex than Gen-Xers or baby boomers born in the 1960s did at the same age. Indeed, 15 percent of 20-to-24-year-olds today report having had no sexual partner since they turned 18. (This is more than double the percentage for those born the 1960s; only 6 percent of them reported being sexually inactive at that age.)

Explanations abound. Some experts posit that porn and virtual sex are replacing the intimacy of actual sex. Others blame the distraction of social media, unrealistic expectations of beauty and sexual prowess perpetuated by the mass media, the pressure of preparing for careers, or the inhibiting effect of so many young adults living with parents.

Many worry about the emergence of a generation that fears the physical and emotional risks of sexual entanglements. Could we be headed for the world once described by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, where people have become so accustomed to interacting with other humans only over their devices that robots must arrange reproduction to avoid extinction?

My own sense is that the changes in the sexual behavior of millennials are less dramatic and more positive. This generation is hardly embracing celibacy in significant numbers. Most of the increase in sexually inactive 20-to-24-year-olds occurred among women; much of this is probably due to their rising age of marriage.

At the same time, most millennials have never been the sexual players portrayed in the media, nor were the Gen-Xers. Still, they face an unprecedented romantic and sexual challenge. Never before have young people reached sexual maturity so early, had so much freedom to explore their sexual desires and identities, and yet had such strong incentives to postpone making long-term romantic commitments.

Hooking up at gatherings and having friends with benefits are two ways young people handle this challenge. Whatever the drawbacks of these practices, they are safer and less exploitative than many traditional ways of dealing with unsatisfied sexual desires, such as resorting to prostitutes or seeking one-night stands with strangers.

After interviewing more than 20,000 college students, sociologist Paula England and other researchers found that fewer than half of all campus hookups involve sexual intercourse. When intercourse does occur, it is typically between students who have hooked up before.

Furthermore, hookups are not replacing relationships. Most students hook up and date during their college years. Less than 10 percent reported having hooked up without ever going out on a date or being in a long-term relationship. More than one-quarter had never hooked up at all, but instead had dated or formed long-term relationships.

As an AARP-card-carrying member of the older generation, I am more impressed by the positive changes we see in the sexual behavior of teens and young adults today than by the negative behaviors that persist. Young people are initiating sex later than their peers did in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. They are taking more precautions, whether by having fewer partners or practicing safer sex. The ever-widening acceptance of consensual sex has been accompanied by a much more definitive rejection of non-consensual contact. The incidence of rape and sexual assault has fallen dramatically since the 1970s.

True, in recent decades, sexual frequency among couples has declined in several countries. Distraction by computers, smartphones or work pressures may be part of the story. But another part may be the fact that women today enjoy more equal status in their relations with men and feel more comfortable saying no.

One group of Gen-Xers and millennials, moreover, seems to have discovered a new secret to sexual happiness. Among heterosexual couples married since the early 1990s, those reporting the highest marital satisfaction — and the most sex — are couples who share housework and child care. In fact, these egalitarian couples are the only couples having more sex than their counterparts in the past.

So perhaps we should spend less time worrying about millennials’ sex lives and more time following the models they seem to be pioneering. Don’t feel pressured to have sex unless you really want to. Don’t feel embarrassed about having consensual sex whenever you want to, with whomever you want to, without feeling you need to commit to either the partner or the “lifestyle.” But when you do commit, don’t settle for anything less than the equality that forms the basis of long-term erotic and emotional satisfaction.

Stephanie Coontz is the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families and author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.”

Re-posted from The Washington Post.

SheaMoisture hair products launched the second phase of its national #BreakTheWalls campaign recently with 60-second commercials challenging what it sees as the beauty industry’s outmoded labeling practices. The spots feature a dazzling array of women of all shades, with every imaginable hair texture, color and style asking the singular question, “What is normal?” Or en Español: “Soy normal?”  The implication is that in today’s multiracial United States, kinky, curly, wavy and nappy hair textures — rather than straight ones — are the new “normal.”

The spots follow the campaign’s debut in April, which featured a brown-skinned woman staring with trepidation at gleaming rows of products in a drugstore aisle. “There is a section called ethnic. And there is an aisle called beauty,” one of several narrators says. “Do I feel like I’m beautiful? Is ‘ethnic’ not beautiful? … How can I break down those walls?”

Fans responding to the first ad on YouTube described it as “powerful,” “beautiful” and “groundbreaking.” Many expressed their gratitude to Shea simply for acknowledging black female consumers, and for affirming their natural hair-care needs with their chemical-free products. But others took issue with the premise, viewing it as a cynical play for white dollars.

This “has nothing to do with empowering women of color,” MsBgood83 wrote. “They simply used black women to make their company pop and now they are moving on to ‘others.’ ” “This is them saying they dont want to be the “black hair care company,” DAsiaW wrote. “Stop drinking the kool-aid guys.”

What the ads — and the reaction to them — speak to, though, is bigger than just hair care. The campaign is forcing Shea and its customers to think carefully about black ownership and expansion. What belongs to whom and who gets to take it away? It’s understandable that black and brown people are quick to call foul whenever their latest dance move, musical innovation, slang — or in this case, hair product — is suddenly seen as being for “everyone.” “Can’t we just have this one thing?” we seem to plead. (As the enraged reaction to Marc Jacobs’s recent multicolored, dreadlocked, mostly white female models on the catwalk demonstrates.)

And Shea’s push to broaden its reach has had other awkward moments.

In February 2015, the company posted several Twitter ads featuring white and Asian babies and children — a move that prompted black-oriented blogs such as MadameNoire to take them to task for a marketing shift they called “jarring.”

Last September, the company again faced backlash after announcing its new “strategic partnership” with Bain Capital Private Equity, a firm founded by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Sundial’s reassurances that it would remain “majority family-owned and operated” weren’t enough to escape accusations of “selling out” and abandoning black consumers.

Again and again, black consumers reference the fate of other black-owned hair-care companies such as Soft Sheen, founded in 1964 by Edward and Bettiann Gardner, who sold homemade products from their basement on the South Side of Chicago. Soft Sheen was purchased by L’Oreal in 1998, which two years later merged it with the Savannah, Ga.-based Carson family company, a white-owned leader in black hair products, to form SoftSheen-Carson.

The average Shea consumer is no doubt also keenly aware of the 2014 L’Oreal purchase of Carol’s Daughter, a black-owned company with early investments from rapper Jay Z that markets itself as Brooklyn #BornAndMade. It, too, has been viewed with suspicion by readers of MadameNoire both when it attempted to diversify its advertising with “racially ambiguous models” rather than darker-skinned black women (a lesson Kanye West might have heeded before issuing his recent inflammatory casting call for “multiracial models” only), and after the announcement of the sale.

But this time the complaints feel just a bit off-base.

The skepticism among some black consumers is complicated by the fact that Sundial Brands, the company behind SheaMoisture, is actually owned by Africans, with products manufactured in Ghana. Can it really be white appropriation when it’s black people defining the terms of the giveaway? And it’s not at all clear that white women are the primary target of their expansion.

Instead, it seems to me that the #BreakTheWalls strategy is far more complicated, in a good way; in a way that other forward-thinking companies might emulate.

Sundial chief executive Richelau Dennis talks often of growth and expansion into a “general market.” If black businesses don’t grow, he told MadameNoire, “they die on the vine.” But what he means by the “general market” isn’t necessarily what the word used to mean: It’s no longer code for “white.”

Instead, the campaign is tapping into a submarket that, until recent years, has received little focused attention: multiracials, a population growing at a rate three times faster than the general population. #BreakTheWalls is actually a small stroke of genius in that sense. It’s no accident that both ads feature strategically placed white women, as well as light-skinned Latinas, some of them mothers with brown-skinned children.

When I asked Dennis about the biracial children in the new ads, he explained that for him, they are the new “general” market. “My mother is biracial. My grandfather was white, in a village in Sierra Leone in the 1940s,” he said. “Just because you see someone physically doesn’t necessarily mean you know who they are. That’s not where the world is headed.”

The company’s target audience — young, and increasingly assertive about their complex racial and ethnic heritages — is part of a powerful new contingent of natural hair-care bloggers and vloggers (“naturalistas”) who’ve made it their mission to offer styling tips, advice and encouragement to women both celebrating, and at times wrestling with, their decision not to chemically straighten their hair. As Dennis put it to me, the naturalistas of today are “younger, larger, louder, more educated, and more affluent” than customers of a generation ago.

And now, he’s got their attention.

***

Liberian-born Dennis and Nyema Tubman, Sundial’s co-founders, came to this country in 1987 to attend Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Mass. Prevented from returning home after the outbreak of Liberia’s second civil war in 1999, the roommates partnered with Dennis’s mother, Mary Dennis, to create their company using recipes passed down from Richelau Dennis’s grandmother Sofi Tucker, a natural healer who first sold soaps and salves in the village market of Bonthe, Sierra Leone, in 1912.

The partners mixed and packaged their products in a two-bedroom apartment on 168th Street in Jamaica, Queens, a space they shared with 10 other people, and peddled their shampoos and styling products on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. After incorporating in 1992, Sundial moved to a manufacturing and distribution warehouse in Amityville, N.Y., where it remains today.

The company employs several thousand workers in its northern and southern cooperatives in Ghana, Dennis told me, where he said the highest quality of shea butter is found. Dennis said the firm reinvests 10 percent of all revenue back into those local businesses — funding piping for water so that young girls can go to school, and constructing warehouses so that workers can sell at full price, year-round.

He’s painfully aware of the “selling out” question. When I asked him about that criticism, he acknowledged the trepidation among some consumers and said he understood it. They’re saying, “‘We’ve seen that happen before, and we don’t want it to happen again,’” he said. “So our job is to reassure. To stand up a little more and speak to those who are concerned.”

“What is normal? Soy normal?” Shea asks.

Despite the ad’s sunny optimism as it envisions a multi-textured, rainbow world, the answer to that question remains highly contested in the here and now. It’s just hair, some might say. But in fact, natural black and brown hair is never that simple. Despite Shea’s best efforts to challenge “normal,” its tenacious roots remain thickly locked. In the drugstore aisle, and beyond.

Kristal Brent Zook is a Council on Contemporary Families board member, an award-winning journalist, author of “Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain,” and a professor at Hofstra University.

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