Sex Role Attitudes And Cultural Change

The initial impetus for this volume was the occasion of the World Congress for Mental Health held in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1977. The theme of that congress was priorities in mental health. The keynote speaker Mrs. Rosalynn Carter, wife of the then President of the United States, focused attention on the necessity for an international perspective in understanding priorities for mental health. Without exception subsequent speakers echoed the sentiments Mrs. Carter expressed, that the first priority for mental health was that of children. For many participants the concern for children was translated not only into techniques for treatment but more importantly into broadening the approaches to prevention. One theme emerged which has begun to be addressed around the world - that of the cultural and developmental implications of sex role stereotyping for mental health. This topic proved to be the touchstone for many issues related both directly and indirectly to mental health. Among the most prominent concerns expressed were those for the effects on careers, the learning environment and relations between the sexes which stem from stereotyped attitudes concerning appropriate sex role behavior. The consensus of the par tiCipants was to urge the directorate of the congress to continue this topic at the next World Congress. This was a particularly appropriate content for the next World Congress, since 1979 was the International Year of the Child.

The twentieth century gave rise to profound changes in traditional sex roles. However, the force of this 'rising tide' has varied among rich and poor societies around the globe, as well as among younger and older generations. Rising Tide sets out to understand how modernization has changed cultural attitudes towards gender equality and to analyze the political consequences of this process. The core argument suggests that women and men's lives have been altered in a two-stage modernization process consisting of (i) the shift from agrarian to industrialized societies and (ii) the move from industrial towards post industrial societies. This book is the first to systematically compare attitudes towards gender equality worldwide, comparing almost 70 nations that run the gamut from rich to poor, agrarian to postindustrial. Rising Tide is essential reading for those interested in understanding issues of comparative politics, public opinion, political behavior, political development, and political sociology.

In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist--who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society--challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation. In her new paradigm, gender is an institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Drawing on many schools of feminist scholarship and on research from anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, Lorber explores different paradoxes of gender: --why we speak of only two "opposite sexes" when there is such a variety of sexual behaviors and relationships; --why transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites do not affect the conceptualization of two genders and two sexes in Western societies; --why most of our cultural images of women are the way men see them and not the way women see themselves; --why all women in modern society are expected to have children and be the primary caretaker; --why domestic work is almost always the sole responsibility of wives, even when they earn more than half the family income; --why there are so few women in positions of authority, when women can be found in substantial numbers in many occupations and professions; --why women have not benefited from major social revolutions. Lorber argues that the whole point of the gender system today is to maintain structured gender inequality--to produce a subordinate class (women) that can be exploited as workers, sexual partners, childbearers, and emotional nurturers. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize economic, educational, and cultural resources or the positions of power.

Essentialist notions of gender difference are being challenged increasingly by research on the social construction of gender. Lorber and Farrell present a key collection of current research which illustrates how the constructivist approach has been applied to a variety of issues, including those centred on the family, the workplace, social class, ethnic identity and politics. Much of the recent work in this area has appeared in the journal Gender and Society which is the genesis of most of the papers in this volume.

In Value Contrasts and Consensus in Present-Day Europe, Wil Arts and Loek Halman have collected a considerable number of contributions that paint the moral landscape of Europe by empirically-theoretically analyzing value patterns.

This book, first published in 1984, is a selective, annotated bibliography on women and deviance that includes historical, cross cultural, sociological, psychological, political, legal, philosophical, and social policy perspectives. This title is concerned with the origins, change, conflict, and consequences of deviant behaviour and "women’s adaptation to their changing roles." It encompasses monographs, journal articles, books, and government documents in English. This title will be of particular interest to students of sociology and criminology.

Gender Roles in Ireland: three decades of attitude change documents changing attitudes toward the role of women in Ireland from 1975 to 2005, a key period of social change in this society. The book presents replicated measures from four separate surveys carried out over three decades. These cover a wide range of gender role attitudes as well as key social issues concerning the role of women in Ireland, including equal pay, equal employment opportunity, maternal employment, contraception etc. Attitudes to abortion, divorce and moral issues are also presented and discussed in the context of people’s voting behaviour in national referenda. Taken together, the data available in these studies paint a detailed and complex picture of the evolving role of women in Ireland during a period of rapid social change and key developments in social legislation. The book brings the results up to the present by including new data on current gender role issues from Margret Fine-Davis' latest research.

This volume elaborates on a number of issues that seem particular important for the people in Central and Eastern Europe: the development and working of democracy, the public support for, legitimacy and efficacy of democracy and the free market economy, and of course the stability of the newly established political culture.