The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood
01 May 1997-Journal of Marriage and Family (National Council on Family Relations)-Vol. 59, Iss: 2, pp 492
TL;DR: Hays as mentioned in this paper argues that women are expected to be nurturing and unselfish in their role as mothers, while they are often competitive and even ruthless at work, reflecting a deep cultural ambivalence about the pursuit of self-interest.
Abstract: While women are expected to be nurturing and unselfish in their role as mothers, they are expected to be competitive and even ruthless at work. Drawing on ideas about mothering since the Middle Ages, on contemporary childrearing manuals, and on in-depth interviews, Hays shows that 'intensive mothering' is a powerful contemporary ideology. These unrealistic expectations of mothers, she suggests, reflect a deep cultural ambivalence about the pursuit of self-interest.
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TL;DR: This article found that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary, while men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent.
Abstract: Survey research finds that mothers suffer a substantial wage penalty, although the causal mechanism producing it remains elusive. The authors employed a laboratory experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that status-based discrimination plays an important role and an audit study of actual employers to assess its real-world implications. In both studies, participants evaluated application materials for a pair of same-gender equally qualified job candidates who differed on parental status. The laboratory experiment found that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary. Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent. The audit study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.
1,727 citations
TL;DR: According to as discussed by the authors, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call "social relational" contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system.
Abstract: According to the perspective developed in this article, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call “social relational” contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system. When gender is salient in these ubiquitous contexts, cultural beliefs about gender function as part of the rules of the game, biasing the behaviors, performances, and evaluations of otherwise similar men and women in systematic ways that the authors specify. While the biasing impact of gender beliefs may be small in any one instance, the consequences cumulate over individuals’ lives and result in substantially different outcomes for men and women. After describing this perspective, the authors show how it sheds newlight on some defining features of the gender system and illustrate its implications for research into specific questions about gender inequality.
1,443 citations
Cites background from "The Cultural Contradictions of Moth..."
...…expectation that mothers are always there for their children creates a cultural contradiction with expectations for the ideal worker, thereby making motherhood appear more directly related to workplace performances than is gender alone (Hays 1996; Ridgeway and Correll forthcoming; Williams 2000)....
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TL;DR: The authors assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research and demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to Bourdieu's understanding of culture.
Abstract: In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not.
1,171 citations
01 Jan 2004
786 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that the gender division of labor in house work became more equal over this period, in part because men increased their time in housework but more importantly because women dramatically decreased the time they spent in these activities.
Abstract: “Is Anyone Doing the Housework?” (Bianchi et al 2000) was motivated, like much of the research on housework, by a desire to better understand gender inequality and social change in the work and family arena in the United States During the 1990s, Arlie Hochschild’s (1989) influential book, The Second Shift, provided the dominant assessment of the gender division of labor in the home (Konigsberg 2011): men were unwilling to share the burden of work in the home and thus employed women came home to a “second shift” of housework and childcare, increasing gender inequality Her rich qualitative study was based on a small sample of unknown generalizability, however (Milkie, Raley, & Bianchi 2009)
The collection and release of the large and nationally representative 1987–88 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) unleashed a flurry of housework articles in the quantitative sociological literature The NSFH had the advantage of reports of housework from both members of a couple and husbands’ and wives’ assessments of fairness in the household division of labor, but these data could not provide the trend analysis critical to the understanding of social change that time diary data collections allowed “Is Anyone Doing the Housework?” used the NSFH but also presented analysis of the only nationally representative data available – time diaries – with which to assess trends in housework and broaden the discussion of how women and men might be reallocating time in the home during a period of rapid change in women’s work outside the home
The citation count in Google Scholar stands at 910 citations (as of April 20, 2012), with those citations continuing to the present1 In the article, we showed that the gender division of labor in housework became more equal over this period, in part because men increased their time in housework but more importantly because women dramatically decreased the time they spent in these activities Men increased their propensity to do housework and the increase was not a result of change in population composition, whereas for women it was a mix of decreased likelihood of doing housework but also an increase in the proportion of women least likely to spend time in housework (eg, employed women) We compared time diary data to the NSFH, demonstrating that the NSFH survey questions resulted in estimates that were about 50 percent higher than time diary estimates but that both data sources yielded similar conclusions about the gender gap in housework Finally, using the NSFH data, we provided a multivariate description of the correlates of wives’ housework time, husbands’ housework time and the gender gap in housework time of married couples The findings remain relevant today, save the need for the update of trends provided here
Using time diary data for 1965, 1975, 1985 and 1995, our observation window on housework was one in which the pressure on women to “shed load” to accommodate increased market work was high and in which the pressure on men to “pick up some of the slack” was perhaps also high Our data analysis spanned the 1970–90 period of greatest labor force increases for US women, particularly married women with young children Subsequent trend analyses of women’s labor force participation, housework and childcare in the 1990s showed much less increase and a leveling off in rates by the end of the 20th century (Sayer 2005; Sayer, Bianchi, & Robinson 2004), causing some to argue that the gender revolution was over (Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman 2011)
633 citations