Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

The book Inequality by Christopher Jencks is in one sense an arid waste of somewhat confusing and misleading statistics between chapter one and chapter nine, and, in another sense, a destructive, unscientific critique of American education and families. Jencks' interpretation comes down hard on his basic feeling that "The crucial problem today is that relatively few people view income inequality as a serious problem; indeed the Nixon administration apparently convinced itself that income was too equally distributed in 1968 and that the rich needed additional incentives to get even richer . The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were only marginally better. Neither made any explicit effort to equalize incomes; the subject was hardly discussed. Instead reformers focused on equalizing opportunity." This view is probably correct but it is no excuse for an unscholarly, unscientific polemic against far from "peripheral institutions," which is Jencks' evaluation of the American schools. This book states

Inequality, A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307/3343529.pdf

Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work

In this paper, we use data from the General Social Survey (1985–1998) to examine the effects of region on gender-role attitudes, focusing on variations across time by gender and race. Regional differences in gender-role attitudes persisted into the 1990s for white men and women, with southern whites holding more traditional attitudes than those held by whites in other parts of the country. For white men and women and for black men, the effect of region changed little between the 1980s and 1990s. However, for black women, region was a prominent factor affecting their gender-role attitudes in the 1980s, but by the 1990s its effect had diminished considerably.

Regional differences in gender—role attitudes: Variations by gender and race

While in the past women had lower educational attainment than men, women in recent years have caught up to and passed men in educational attainment. Lower occupational aspirations for women compared to men contributed to lower educational attainment in the past. In this article, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to consider whether occupational aspirations still act to lower educational attainment for women compared to men or whether occupational aspirations are currently an advantage for young women. We find that occupational aspirations are an advantage for women for high school graduation but not for college graduation.

Occupational Aspirations, Gender, and Educational Attainment

This paper assesses which types of government and social support predict employment among unwed mothers the year after childbirth. We performed logistic regression analysis on a nationally-representative, mother-only subset of the Fragile Families public-use baseline and 1-year follow-up data. Unwed mothers were more likely to be employed if they received WIC, employment agency assistance, or instrumental social support. They were less likely to be employed if they received TANF, food stamps, housing subsidies, SSI, public housing, or cohabited with a partner. Targeted nutrition programs, employment agencies, and instrumental social support seemed to facilitate employment. Other social programs and cohabiting either served as disincentives to work or gave unwed mothers the option to remain home, depending on the perspective taken.

Employment of Unwed Mothers: The Role of Government and Social Support

Using data from undergraduates we found that financial resources, intelligence, and having responsibility were important sources of social power. Consistent with traditional gender norms, women were more likely than were men to perceive social power from emotional intimacy, social skills, and parenting. Men were more likely than were women to perceive having a lot of social power due to physical strength and social status. Unexpected was that more men than women chose sexuality as a source of power. An awareness of gender stratification was found in the reports that “women in general” do not have a lot of social power and women were more likely than were men to say that “men in general” had a lot of social power.

Gender and self-perceptions of social power

Parents' educational attainment is generally completed before offspring are born. Thus, there is little opportunity to study the ways in which children's observation of their parents' pursuit of education may augment the effects of structural factors on intergenerational transmission processes. In this article, the authors use qualitative and quantitative data collected from thirty-five women across a decade following their return to school to examine the effects of children's observations of their mothers' educational achievements on the children's educational aspirations and achievements in adulthood. The return to school was consequential only when mothers completed their degrees; when they did not, their enrollment appears to have had little or no effect on children's educational achievements. Mothers' completion of college was found to be the most important for children's educational outcomes when fathers were less educated and opposed to mothers' enrollment and when the return to school was fueled b...

/pdf/unforeseen-consequences-of-mothers-return-to-school-children-179xmc7a19.pdf

Rebecca S. Powers

Papers

Regional differences in gender—role attitudes: Variations by gender and race

Occupational Aspirations, Gender, and Educational Attainment

Employment of Unwed Mothers: The Role of Government and Social Support

Gender and self-perceptions of social power

Unforeseen Consequences of Mothers' Return to School: Children's Educational Aspirations and Outcomes