Paula England

During the twentieth century arrangements governing love, work, and their routinization in households and employment underwent a transformation. During this period women gained employment opportunities. This reduced sex differentiation, but did not equalize the roles or power of men and women. The goal of this book is to describe the trends and patterns that remain constant amidst the change, and to provide an integrated framework for understanding them.The authors focus on a three-tier level of integration that is not available in other studies of this kind. First, they combine the topics of households and employment, showing similarities and causal links between household and employment arrangements. Second, a conceptual framework is provided that gives attention to both individuals' choices and to the structural constraints that limit available options. Finally, an integration of economic and sociological views of employment, demographic behavior, and other household behavior is examined.By using both individual and structural views, Paula England and George Farkas provide an overview of this coupling. This work is unique in that it draws from both economics and sociology and from demographers in both disciplines. Households, Employment, and Gender is an analytic synthesis for scholars and an invaluable sourcebook for classes on gender, labor, the family, social demography, economics, and economic sociology.

A Social, Economic, and Demographic View

Households, Employment, and Gender

How do various social theories explain gender inequality? Are these theories infused with masculinist biases that need to be redressed with insights from feminist theory? To address these questions, this collection of original essays features prominent sociologists discussing the strengths and the limitations of the theoretical traditions within which they have worked. Among the theoretical perspectives included are those of Marxism, world system theory, macrostructural theories, rational choice theory, neofunctionalism, psychoanalysis, ethno-methodology, expectation states theory, poststructuralist symbolic interactionism, and network theory. Each of the chapter-length essays of the first two sections provides an overview of the theory, explains its implications for gender inequality, reviews empirical research, and comments upon sexist biases or other limitations of the perspective. The final section contains chapters on feminist debates over methodology, critical commentaries on the preceding papers by four feminist scholars, and replies by the original authors.

Feminism on Theory

Theory on Gender

This volume provides a detailed description of the situation of women in employment in the early 1990s and considers how sociological and economic theories of labor markets illuminate the gap in pay between the sexes.

Theories and Evidence

Comparable Worth

Kathryn Edin

Today, a third of American children are born outside of marriage, up from one child in twenty in the 1950s, and rates are even higher among low-income Americans. Many herald this trend as one of the most troubling of our time. But the decline in marriage does not necessarily signal the demise of the two parent family—over 80 percent of unmarried couples are still romantically involved when their child is born and nearly half are living together. Most claim they plan to marry eventually. Yet half have broken up by their child's third birthday. What keeps some couples together and what tears others apart? After a breakup, how do fathers so often disappear from their children's lives? An intimate portrait of the challenges of partnering and parenting in these families, Unmarried Couples with Children presents a variety of unique findings. Most of the pregnancies were not explicitly planned, but some couples feel having a child is the natural course of a serious relationship. Many of the parents are living with their child plus the mother's child from a previous relationship. When the father also has children from a previous relationship, his visits to see them at their mother's house often cause his current partner to be jealous. Breakups are more often driven by sexual infidelity or conflict than economic problems. After couples break up, many fathers complain they are shut out, especially when the mother has a new partner. For their part, mothers claim to limit dads' access to their children because of their involvement with crime, drugs, or other dangers. For couples living together with their child several years after the birth, marriage remains an aspiration, but something couples are resolutely unwilling to enter without the financial stability they see as a sine qua non of marriage. They also hold marriage to a high relational standard, and not enough emotional attention from their partners is women's number one complaint. Unmarried Couples with Children is a landmark study of the family lives of nearly fifty American children born outside of a marital union at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Based on personal narratives gathered from both mothers and fathers over the first four years of their children's lives, and told partly in the couples' own words, the story begins before the child is conceived, takes the reader through the tumultuous months of pregnancy to the moment of birth, and on through the child's fourth birthday. It captures in rich detail the complex relationship dynamics and powerful social forces that derail the plans of so many unmarried parents. The volume injects some much-needed reality into the national discussion about family values, and reveals that the issues are more complex than our political discourse suggests.

Paula England

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