gender

Linda Nielsen is a Council on Contemporary Families Expert, as well as a professor of Educational and Adolescent Psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Most of Nielsen’s research centers around the relationship between fathers and daughters. Nielsen’s research gained national attention when Pantene—the shampoo brand—reached out to her in hopes of creating a Super Bowl ad that was inspired by her research and centered around the importance of father-daughter relationships. Nielsen answered a few questions for us about her research, her own family, and any advice that she has:

Q: First, a challenge: what’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

LN: After writing books and articles about fathers and daughters for nearly three decades, the one single thing I know about father-daughter relationships is that most fathers and daughters would both like to have a more communicative, more comfortable, more personal relationship with one another. Both would like to spend more one on one time together without other family members involved – especially during the daughter’s teenage years when society generally discourages anything more than dad being involved in his daughters’ athletic or academic life – or being her banking machine.

Q: What does your family–both family-of-origin and family-of-choice–look like, and how does that fit with what you know about American families today? Are there points of dissonance? more...

A January Huffington Post article reported on a recent study that showed that 43.5 percent of single mothers get fewer than seven hours of sleep, and 52 percent wake up feeling unrested. Kristi Williams, sociologist and senior scholar for the Council on Contemporary Families raised some good questions for HuffPo readers. In the reporter’s words, Williams noted that “the study doesn’t actually show whether single parenthood causes sleep problems. Because single parenthood is also concentrated among poor and racial minority groups, it’s hard to tell whether being a single parent, being poor or being part of a certain minority group is a stronger factor in poor sleep and poor health.” Williams put it succinctly: “Family policy is health policy.” more...

In January of 2013, Texas became one of several states to ban Planned Parenthood and its affiliates from using public funds to pay for health care. A February 3 New England Journal of Medicine study, “Effects of Removal of Planned Parenthood from the Texas Women’s Health Program,” examined the consequences, and Joseph Potter, Professor of Sociology at University of Texas-Austin, one of the study’s co-authors, will discuss the results  at the CCF 2016 Annual Conference.

Why is this study so important?

The NEJM study demonstrates the consequences of excluding Planned Parenthood affiliates from Texas’s fee-for-service family planning program. To do this, the authors evaluated rates of contraceptive-method provision, method continuation through the program, and childbirth covered by Medicaid two years before the exclusion and two years after the exclusion. The data in this study was drawn from all Medicaid claims from 2011 through 2014. 

As for results?

Once the exclusion was in place, provision of the most effective reversible methods of contraception (such as IUDs, implants, and injectable contraception) decreased and Medicaid-paid births increased among injectable contraceptive users. Specifically, claims for IUDs and implants declined 31 percent, claims for injectable contraceptives declined 35 percent, and Medicaid-paid deliveries increased by 27 percent among users of injectable contraception. So, by excluding affiliates of abortion providers (chiefly Planned Parenthood) led to reducing women’s access to highly effective contraception and the subsequent increase in Medicaid-paid births.

Dedicated women’s health providers matter.

“Simply put, dedicated women’s health providers matter. Providers who are mission-driven and have the requisite experience and knowledge appear to be critical for the delivery of the most effective methods of contraception—IUDs, implants, and injectables. From a demographic perspective, this is important because both national studies and local studies show that these methods dramatically decrease unintended pregnancy. We also have accumulating evidence that there is unmet demand for these methods in Texas” noted Dr. Potter in a press release from the NEJM. He went on to say “While this paper does not tell us much about women’s experiences after the exclusion, we have evidence from another study, recently published in the journal of Contraception, that Planned Parenthood clients encountered barriers such as unnecessary exams, multiple visits, and additional costs as they tried to find a new provider after January 2013.”

Hear more about this study at the CCF Conference.

The roll-back on women’s access to affordable and accessible reproductive health care is at a record high in Texas and around the country. Dr. Potter will update participants on controversial topics surrounding family policy, as well as outline key aspects of the public debate at The Council on Contemporary Families 2016 Annual Conference: Families as They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debate. The conference, at University of Texas-Austin, March 4 and 5, will be host to a range of topics and debates that will engage scholars from multiple disciplines. To hear from Dr. Joseph Potter, and learn details about the CCF 2016 Annual Conference visit here.

The NEJM article is coauthored by Amanda J. Stevenson, Imelda M. Flores-Vasquez, Richard L. Allgeyer, Pete Schenkkan, and Joseph E. Potter.

Molly McNulty is a CCF Public Affairs Intern at Framingham State University. She is a joint Sociology and Education major.

I decided to take a methods course in the Women’s Studies department this spring. The first assignment was to identify a word central to our research interests and to trace the etymology of our choice. As a sociologist primarily interested in families and inequality, I decided on the word marriage, thinking it might offer insight into the transformation of American families today.

Although marriage has been a universal social institution throughout recorded history, with one exception (the Na people of China), there is no consensus on a definition of marriage.[i] When researching the word’s origins, I started where I always do, with historian and family scholar Stephanie Coontz. In her book “Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage,” Coontz details in Chapter 2 the historical challenges of defining precisely what marriage means. Across societies and time, marriage has included (but has not been limited to) the union of: two families; one man and one woman; one woman and one ghost; one man and many women; two people who have a child together; and one woman and all brothers in a family. More recently, regulations of personal unions have centered around age, race, and sex (e.g., in the U.S., minimum age limits, Loving v. Virginia, Obergefell v. Hodges).

While marriage regulates social rights and obligations, nearly every function of marriage has been achieved by a mechanism other than marriage in one society or another. According to Coontz, stories that marriage was invented either for the protection of women or to keep women oppressed are probably not true. More likely, Coontz argues, marriage was an informal social mechanism to organize the daily tasks of life, sexual relationships, and child rearing. As greater economic disparity grew, marriage transitioned from functioning as a vehicle for creating community connections into a means to consolidate resources and transmit property. The meaning of marriage shifted dramatically in the twentieth century, moving from an institutional marriage to a companionate marriage.[ii] Essentially, spouses were assumed to be each other’s friend, a role not central to earlier definitions of marriage.[iii] The second transition was from companionate marriages to individualized marriages. In this conceptualization, the emphasis is on personal development whereby marriage leads to fulfillment and growth for both partners.

It is challenging to untangle contemporary definitions of marriage from definitions of wife and husband. Wife is a noun, defined in relation to another. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, wife means “the woman someone is married to.” Wives often take on adjectives such as military wife, political wife, housewife, and so on.[iv] Author Anne Kingston reports the first appearance of the word wife in the Bible is in Genesis 2:18: “And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” As a concept, wife understood, quite literally, as a helpmate. Husband, on the other hand, is either a noun or a verb, meaning “a male partner in a marriage,” “to save,” “a frugal manager,” or “to till the ground, to cultivate.”

Last year, the definition of marriage was central to the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which ultimately granted same-sex couples the right to marry in the U.S. While a somewhat oversimplified interpretation, the case hinged on the Justices’ acceptance that the definition of marriage evolves over time.[v] Justice Kennedy wrote, on behalf of the majority: “The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. Changes, such as the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential. These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.” Kennedy added, “This view of marriage as timeless and unchanging was contradicted by an abundance of scholarly work.”[vi]

For further fun, I decided to see what Google images appear with the search term “marriage definition.” Some of my favorites, because they are insightful, funny, appalling, or thought-provoking, are posted below. Full disclosure, I skipped the hate-filled images.

Joanna R. Pepin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She primarily researches romantic relationships and inequality, such as power between partners and the association between romantic partnerships and social stratification.

Follow her on Twitter: @CoffeeBaseball

[i] Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Reprint edition. New York: Penguin Books.

[ii] Cherlin, Andrew J. 2004. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66(4):848–61.

[iii] Burgess, Ernest W. and Harvey J. Locke. 1945. The Family: From Institution to Companionship. New York: American Book Company.

[iv] Kingston, Anne. 2004. The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Picador.

[v] Obergefell v. Hodges. 576 U.S. ___ 2015. Justia Law. Retrieved February 1, 2016 (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/).

[vi] Perry, David M. 2015. “A New Right Grounded in the Long History of Marriage.” The Atlantic, June 26. Retrieved February 1, 2016 (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/history-marriage-supreme-court/396443/).

Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz, “Disclosure of Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence to Police among Lesbian, Gays, and Bisexuals,” Social Currents. 2015

Perception of the police is a heavily discussed topic these days. At the same time, police are often under-utilized when it comes to domestic crimes, such as intimate partner violence (IPV). There is, unfortunately, a history of police homophobia, which means that they are even more under-utilized when it comes to intimate partner violence among lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGB). This is the area of focus provided by Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz (twitter: @XGuadalupeDiaz) who analyzed data involving comfort of the LGB community in terms of disclosing intimate partner violence to the police. Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz is an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Framingham State University who studies applied sociology, intimate partner violence, victimization, and gender and sexualities.

In his recent article, Guadalupe-Diaz analyzed data that was collected by a local nonprofit in the southeastern part of the United States. Through local nonprofits that served LGB-identified people as well as via media popular among LGB-identified people, participants were invited to take an online survey that asked questions about the respondent’s socio-demographics, their intimate partner violence experiences, and their comfort with disclosing information to the police. Some of the questions that they were asked dealt with if the respondent felt that law enforcement officers were sensitive to issues that surround LGB individuals and if the respondent felt that law enforcement officers were homophobic. more...

If I am to believe findings from the media coverage of a recent study, then I should anticipate a life where I return home from work and nonchalantly prop up my feet, crack open a cold beer, and patiently wait for sex once my wife has finished cleaning up the sink full of dishes following a delicious home-cooked meal she singlehandedly prepared while our two young children wreaked havoc on the house. This scenario seems better suited to science fiction than social science, for sure. To say I was skeptical of the study that serves as the basis for this questionable fantasy would be an understatement.

This widely publicized study a few years back ignited a pop culture debate about how men’s contributions around the house impacted a couple’s sex life. Drawing on a large national sample of married couples surveyed once in the early 1990s, Kornrich, Brines, and Leupp found husbands who did more of the housework that women often do (making dinner, cleaning house) had less sex, while men completing more “manly” tasks (mowing the lawn, washing the car) was linked with having sex more often. The authors argued that: “traditionally masculine and feminine behaviors consciously or unconsciously serve as turn-ons for individuals” (p. 31). My coauthors and I interpreted this conclusion as unfortunately implying that “husbands emasculate themselves by completing housework traditionally considered to be women’s responsibility and, therefore, experience reduced sexual frequency because they rendered themselves less sexually appealing … by doing the dishes.”

We explored sex and men’s contributions to chores traditionally done by women (cleaning, shopping) using data from couples repeatedly surveyed every year for five years as part of the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relations and Family Dynamics (pairfam) study. We considered men’s housework in two ways: actual share and perceived fairness. Actual share was the extent to which men shared traditionally feminine tasks (did more or less than female partner vs. 50/50 split) and perceived fairness was whether men felt their contributions to housework were fair (did more or less than their fair share of housework vs. fairly shared). Our study then looked to see whether actual share and perceived fairness predicted future sex frequency and sex satisfaction of both partners. Such an approach is critical to gain an accurate understanding of how relationship dynamics unfold as couples move through time together. Studies based on data gathered at only one point in time are inherently limited in their ability to identify aspects of intimate partnerships that promote or inhibit later couple sexuality.

Our results demonstrated no association between men’s actual share of housework and sex. However, when men reported making a fair contribution to housework, the couple enjoyed more frequent and satisfying sex in the future. A good deal of social science research and theory indicates the determination of fairness is a subjective process based on comparisons to societal norms, personal expectations, and the circumstances of a particular couple’s daily life. Applied to housework, equal contributions may not necessarily be fair. The optimal amount of housework men should or should not be doing is something to be actively negotiated between partners. When both partners are on the same page regarding household responsibilities, sex may be more frequent and satisfying because feelings of bitterness and anger are less likely to accumulate knowing one’s partner is pulling his weight around the house.

Rather than avoiding chores in the hopes of having more sex, findings from my study paint a different picture. Men are likely to experience more frequent and satisfying (for both partners) passion between the sheets when they simply do their fair share. We suspect this will involve scrubbing dishes from time to time.

Matt Johnson is an assistant professor of family science in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta. He studies the development of couple relations to identify mechanisms responsible for relationship success or failure. He would like to thank Nancy Galambos for her edits and helpful suggestions on this post.

Over at Families as They Really Are, Erin Anderson has posted about men’s lagging uptake of family leave when it is available. Over here, we have prepared a round-up on how men are doing in families by looking back at papers from the Council on Contemporary Families.

An issue related to use (or not) of family leave has to do with the underlying security of jobs: In the CCF June 2013 Symposium on the Equal Pay Act, economist Heidi Shierholz wrote about the erosion of men’s wages in the past few decades. She explains, “In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.” Read more here. more...

August 26 was Women’s Equality Day. Established in 1971, the day commemorates passage of the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. But political equality did not begin to extend to economic equality or marital equality until the 1970s, despite passage of the Civil Rights and Equal Pay Acts in the mid-1960s. As late as 1975, women earned only 60 cents for every dollar a man earned, and no state had yet repealed the laws that gave a man immunity from raping his wife.

Since then, women’s progress in upward occupational mobility and earnings has been dramatic. Dual-earner marriages are now the norm, women now outpace men in educational achievement, and growing numbers of wives out-earn their husbands.

For many years, however, women’s gains seemed to destabilize marriages and threaten family formation. As women entered the workforce, marriage rates fell and divorce rates soared. Fertility plummeted, and policy-makers worried that career-oriented women were turning their backs on motherhood entirely. Some early studies suggested that when wives got their husbands to do housework, they were more likely to get beaten up (Fuchs 1988), or at the very least, to have less happy sex lives.

Many of these developments, however, were products of a transitional period of adjustment, especially marked in the 1970s and 1980s, when women embraced gender equality more quickly than did men and experienced widespread discontent with the persistence of traditional marriage and family arrangements.

The gender revolution is nowhere complete, but there is now evidence that the further progress of the gender revolution is in many cases resulting in a certain restabilization of family life.

• In the US and many other countries, divorce rates have fallen among couples who express the greatest support for gender equality. Women’s higher education and earnings now seem to help rather than hurt their marriage chances.
• In Sweden, women with a high career orientation are now more likely to enter a union than other women (Thomson and Bernhardt 2010). And in other countries with strong work-family support systems (Finland and Norway as well as Sweden), dual-earner marriages are now less likely to divorce than male breadwinner ones (Cooke et al 2013).
• In US marriages formed in the early 1990s and since, couples who share housework report higher marital quality and better sexual relationships than those with a more traditional division of labor. And even among older men (ages 51-92) those with egalitarian gender role attitudes report much higher levels of marital happiness than otherwise comparable men with traditional attitudes (Kaufman 2006).

Men’s increasing involvement in child care and housework (Sullivan, et al. 2014) seems to be critical here.

• An analysis of 13 industrialized countries (Sevilla-Sanz 2010) found that men with more egalitarian attitudes were more likely to form a romantic union and particularly to cohabit than men with less egalitarian attitudes.
• Among cohabitors, men who were involved in the care of their children (providing care when the mother was absent, taking children to daycare and medical appointments) were more likely to make the transition to marriage than those less involved (Kotila 2014).

In fact, such men’s involvement seems to make women more willing to have children.

• Studies show that when men are more involved with their children after the birth of a first child, a couple is more likely to have a second child. This is the case both in Sweden (Goldscheider, Bernhardt and Brandén 2013) and the US. In the US, the big difference was between the most sharing couples and those who shared inconsistently (81 percent of the former had a 2^nd child compared with only 55 percent of the latter [Torr and Short 2006]).
• This may be why fertility patterns in Europe are changing: In the 1970s, the countries in Europe with the lowest levels of women’s employment (primarily in southern Europe) had the highest fertility; by the 1990s this relationship had reversed, with the countries of northern Europe, which have the highest levels of women’s employment, also having the highest fertility.

References:

Fuchs, Victor R. 1988. Women’s Quest for Economic Equality, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Kotila, Letitia. 2014. “The role of father involvement in the union transitions of cohabiting parents.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, Boston, MA.

Kaufman, Gayle. 2006. “Gender and marital happiness in later life,” Journal of Family Issues 27(6):735-757.

Torr, Berna Miller and Susan E. Short. 2004. “Second births and the second shift: A research note on gender equity and fertility,” Population and Development Review 30:109-130.

Goldscheider, Frances, Eva Bernhardt, and Maria Brandén. 2013. “Domestic gender equality and childbearing in Sweden,” Demographic Research 29 (40):1097-1126.

Cooke, Lynn, et al. 2013. “Labor and love: Wives’ employment and divorce risk in its socio-political context,” Social Politics 20(4):482-509.

Sullivan, Oriel, Francesco Billari, and Evrim Altintas. 2014. “Father’s changing contributions to child care and domestic work in very low fertility countries: The effect of education,” Journal of Family Issues 35(8):1048-1065.

Sevilla-Sanz, Almudena. 2010. “Household division of labor and cross-country differences in household formation rates,” Journal of Population Economics 23: 225-249.

Released originally on August 25, 2015.

This paper is part of the Council on Contemporary Families Gender Revolution Rebound Symposium. The growing wage premium for long work hours slows progress toward gender equality. If the relative hourly wages for overwork had stayed constant between 1979 and 2007, the gender gap in wages would be about 10% smaller than it is today.

The new data presented by David Cotter and his co-authors suggest that support for gender equality and respect for women’s ability to combine work and family have resumed their upward progress. Other evidence reveals that millennial men express greater interest in more involved fatherhood and want more balance between work and family than previous generations. However, it remains to be seen whether these ideological changes will substantively reduce such structural inequalities as men’s continuing earnings advantage over women and women’s underrepresentation in highly paid occupations. more...

In the 1989 cult classic movie When Harry Met Sally, Harry says that in friendships between men and women, “the sex part always gets in the way.” This was precisely my concern when I began writing about friendships between men and women in the early American republic. How could I convince modern readers steeped in the When Harry Met Sally claim that friendships between men and women were impossible that the opposite was true, even 200 years ago?

In my book, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, I argue that heterosocial friendships were not just possible, but important and meaningful relationships that challenge the ideology that marriage was the supreme place for adult fulfillment. Initially, I had hoped to skirt the issue of sexuality, but that was impossible. Sex did get in the way of these friendships, though not in the way you might think. The problem was more often with public misunderstandings about whether men and women were friends or lovers. It was a constant battle to shape perceptions. At another level, sex—or at least physical intimacy or simply flirtation—was a constant specter in these friendships.

I define heterosocial friendships as “affectionate, reciprocal relationships that the historical actors themselves cast in terms of a friendship” between unrelated men and women, with the stipulation that “sexual activity does not factor into this definition of friendship.” Historians simply cannot know what happened in a private room in the past. We do know from letters and diaries, however, that friends could express their affection in what sounds to modern ears like sensual or romantic terms and share physical intimacy.

One of the key resources for untangling the role of sexuality in these friendships was a 1989 article by sociologist Donald O’Meara titled “Cross-Sex Friendship: Four Basic Challenges of an Ignored Relationship.” I was stunned by how closely his observations of relationships of the 1980s applied to the friendships from the past that I examined. Friends had to navigate their shared understanding of the status of their relationship—was this a courtship, an affair, a friendship?—as well as the public perception. While the stakes for misunderstanding were higher 200 years ago, when gossip about a woman’s sexuality could destroy her reputation and marriage prospects, similar concerns have been remarkably persistent.

Some of my historical examples of the role of physical and sexual intimacy in heterosocial friendships sound familiar to modern readers. In 1834, Elizabeth Peabody recorded a conversation with her friend Horace Mann about “the difference between love and friendship” and where their relationship stood. Then there were teenage girls like Patty Rogers in 1785 who struggled to understand their feelings for men in their lives. Patty was determined when it came to one male friend: “I only feel a friendship for him! I’ll steel my heart to every sentiment of Love!” As O’Meara points out, there are different types of love which can be hard to distinguish and identify, and it can be hard for friends to come to a shared understanding. This continued to be the case for Patty, who protested when the same man put his hand on her breast one night. She told him it was inappropriate, but he protested “No, not between two friends!”

A major source of difficulty for historical figures and contemporary historians is the lack of clear norms for the conduct of heterosocial friendships. O’Meara argues that such friendships have “a deviant status in American culture” and “the norms for cross-sex friendship remain unclear.” The situation was little different in early America, despite the ubiquity of conduct books prescribing behavior. The primary difference is that the language early Americans used sounds romantic to us today but was understood quite differently in the past.

All of this meant that readers brought their own assumptions, beliefs, and ideologies to my book. One reviewer on Goodreads argued that the book was not actually about friendships, because “the vast majority of these friendships seem to wind up with somebody’s hands up somebody else’s petticoats.” At the opposite end of the spectrum, writer Thomas Fleming published a piece on History News Network positing that the book could be “the answer to our hookup culture” because the book showed that heterosocial friendships were possible, entirely absent of sex.

This major divide in reception of the book has been largely a divide between lay readers and scholars. Scholars, now steeped in a literature of sexuality that has usefully complicated notions of what relationships were possible in the past, readily accepted that heterosocial friendships were possible. Outside of academia, there seems to be a narrower lens for reading these relationships. Understanding that men and women could be friends hundreds of years ago, long before women’s liberation and acceptance of premarital sex, is important for Americans today. Along with the changed attitudes towards and legal climate for same-sex romantic relationships, we have greater possibilities for cross-sex friendships: The possibilities for varied types of love, sexuality, and fulfillment are broader than most people imagine.

Cassandra Good is a historian, writer, and teacher of early America. She received her PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and is Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington.

LINKS:

Founding Friendships: http://www.amazon.com/Founding-Friendships-between-American-Republic/dp/0199376174

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23027663-founding-friendships

O’Meara article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00289102

HNN article: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159632