Women in Academic Sociology, 1925–75

Abstract

The career patterns of two distinguished sociologists, Arnold and Caroline Rose, exemplify male-female differentials in academic career patterns in sociology. Arnold's career was a straight and steep line of progression; Caroline's, despite her record of scholarly productivity, existed on the fringes of academia—night school, correspondence courses, and extension and part-time teaching. Examination of the authors and reviews in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review confirms this model of women at the academic margins: over the years, women have written a far greater proportion of the book reviews than of the articles. This pattern parallels that women in academic life generally, although not all of it can be attributed to discriminatory factors. While the participation of women in mainstream academic life has increased in very recent years, these historic patterns indicate the possible need for different formal models of male and female academic careers.     

Madam Senator: Growth in Women's State Senate Representation, 1978–2010

Using a dataset of women state senators from all 50 states (1978–2010) and latent growth curve analysis, this article tests two longitudinal theories of the growth of women's political representation over time. Gender salience theory posits that women increase their political representation when they explicitly campaign on their gender. Political climate theory argues that women fare better electorally during periods when domestic issues predominate as opposed to international issues. Results provide support for gender salience theory, but the evidence is too mixed for political climate theory to provide a plausible explanation for the growth in women's state-level political representation. By political party, results suggest that Democratic women were generally advantaged over Republican women; however, Republican women exclusively benefited in the 1992 and 2010 elections. This article concludes with an assessment of the two longitudinal theories and what they may tell us more broadly about women in politics.     

Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender

The author offers a revision of melancholy gender (Butler, 1995 Butler, J. 1995. Melancholy gender.. Psychoanal. Dial., 5: 165–180. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) in which sex differences are theorized. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theory that emphasizes the mother's role as primary caretaker and as pre-Oedipal object for both boys and girls, the author suggests that, in heterosexual development and within heterosexual cultures, same-sex object-desire is likely to be unavowedly lost for girls but preemptively foreclosed for boys. While the theory of melancholy gender does not differentiate between loss and foreclosure, the author argues that this is an important distinction such that Freud's two preconditions of melancholy—unavowed loss and ambivalent identification—are more likely to be part of female development than of male development, leading to melancholy femininity in girls and obsessive-compulsive masculinity in boys. This argument allows the theory of melancholy gender to speak to the empirical and clinical finding that femininity and depression tend to be associated whereas masculinity and depression do not.     

The Work of the Russian Liberation Committee in London, 1919–1924

Abstract

The Russian Liberation Committee was one of the most active of the Russian émigré organizations operating in London in the period following the Russian Revolution. It acted as a clearing house for news on the Russian civil war, receiving telegrams from each of the fronts and distributing them to the British press. It also produced a variety of publications of its own, for distribution to the public, government officials and to soldiers in Russia. In this article, the Committee's work and publications are examined for the light they shed on anti-Bolshevik propaganda in Britain, and on the sources of information on the civil war available to the British press. While the Committee's efforts could not alter the pragmatic policy of the British government or the already anti-Bolshevik attitude of the British press, their presence made an important difference to the amount and kind of information that was available in Britain during the course of the Russian civil war.     

Mapping the City: Innovation and Continuity in the Chicago School of Sociology, 1920–1934

This paper examines the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of the maps of the city of Chicago produced by sociologists at the University of Chicago between 1920 and 1934. I argue that the three mapping schemes produced in those years—the concentric zone map of The City (1925), the base map of 75 community areas and the census tract maps published in three volumes of Census Data of the City of Chicago (1920, 1930, 1934)—draw upon distinct historical antecedents and have distinct theoretical implications. The first scheme exhibits the strong influence of Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s location theory and maps produced by early Chicago city boosters, the second most clearly exhibits the influence of the Social Survey Movement and of pragmatist philosophy and the third, the influence of the financial and governmental interests of the organizations that made up the Chicago Census Committee. Literature on early urban sociology and mapping in Chicago has hitherto not adequately differentiated these three mapping schemes or problematized the implications of their differences for our understanding of the theoretical commitments of the “Chicago School.”     

Abolition,Economic Transition,Gender and Slavery: The Expansion of Women's Slaveholding in Ghana, 1807–18741

The British withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade fostered the expansion, rather than retrenchment of slavery within Africa. It also spurred a shift in the pre-nineteenth-century gendered pattern of slaveholding. This paper examines the extent to which radical economic changes altered the gendered structure of slaveholding in post-abolition Ghana. It argues that the British prohibition liberalised slaveholding conditions and resulted in a reconceptualisation of the value of slaves which breached the tradition of restricted female proprietorship of slaves, and also led to increased women's earning capacity, slave acquisition and use, as well as the scale of their holdings.     

Parent–Child Positive Touch: Gender,Age, and Task Differences

This study examined gender, age, and task differences in positive touch and physical proximity during mother–child and father–child conversations. Sixty-five Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.50 months, SD = 3.54) and 6-year-old (M = 77.07 months, SD = 3.94) children participated in this study. Positive touch was examined during a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past emotions). Fathers touched their children positively more frequently during the play-related storytelling task than did mothers. Both mothers and fathers were in closer proximity to their 6-year-olds than their 4-year-olds. Mothers and fathers touched their children positively more frequently when reminiscing than when playing. Finally, 6-year-olds remained closer to their parents than did 4-year-olds. Implications of these findings for future research on children’s socioemotional development are discussed.     

Rurality and Income Inequality in the United States, 1975–2015

Recent events have focused attention on the perceived widening of the economic divide between urban and rural areas, and on the continued rise of national income inequality. We demonstrate that, in fact, the average income gap between urban (metropolitan) and rural (nonmetropolitan) households has not risen over the past 40 years, and makes virtually no contribution to national income inequality. Rising national inequality is driven by rising inequality within both urban and rural America, not by an urban/rural divergence. As is well known, the growing dispersion of household money income is partly driven by rising wage inequality, particularly in urban areas. Less well recognized is the role played by other income sources. We show that a decline in the progressivity of the distribution of social security payments and cash transfers, and an increase in the regressivity of the distribution of retirement incomes, have jointly made a comparably large contribution to rising income inequality. At the same time, the share of income from self-employment has declined, particularly in rural America, and because self-employment income is very unequally distributed, its diminution has retarded the growth of rural inequality. In 2014–15, however, rural inequality increased, cutting the urban/rural inequality gap in half.     

Sociology in the women’s annex: Inequality and integration at Harvard and Radcliffe, 1879–1947

This article examines gender stratification in sociology by analyzing how the subject was presented to undergraduates at Harvard and Radcliffe from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1940s. Data for relevant courses in economics and social ethics, as well as sociology, demonstrate that women were disadvantaged throughout the period. The analysis also shows, however, that women gradually attained relative equality, and argues that gender integration was always a covert goal of Harvard's policy of "coordinate education." The article explains the process of equalization in terms of cooperative relationships in informal work groups. Ironically, however, integration disempowered Harvard faculty and Radcliffe administrators while augmenting the power of Harvard's centralizing administration. Lawrence T. Nichols has published in the areas of criminology and deviance, social problems, sociological theory, business ethics, and the historical sociology of social science.     

The Use of the Conceptual Category of Race in American Sociology, 1937–99

We examine how mainstream sociology has used race as an explanatory factor by examining papers in the American Sociological Review between 1937 and 1999. We find a dramatic increase in the likelihood that sociologists will take race into account, and we suggest that methodological innovations are largely responsible for creating an environment in which it is taken for granted that analysts in many fields will control for race. This pattern of usage may reinforce an implicit conception of racial differences that we call broad but shallow, in that race is expected to matter almost everywhere, but its effect can be neutralized by the addition of a control.     

Framing Feminism: News Coverage of the Women's Movement in British and American Newspapers, 1968–1982

This article analyses the framing in four British and American newspapers of the second-wave feminist movement during its most politically active period (1968–1982). Using content and critical discourse analysis of 555 news articles, the article investigates how movement members were represented, what problems and solutions to women's oppression/inequality were posed and whose voices were used. This paper identifies: opposition to the movement, support for the movement, conflict and movement defined in terms of its goals. In addition to exploring nuances in coverage across time and space, we use a feminist perspective to make political statements about how gendered hierarchies function through media discourse, and argue that the circulation of patriarchal and capitalist ideologies worked to prevent women's equal partnership with men in both countries.     

Correction to: Quality Differences of Public,For-Profit and Nonprofit Providers in Scandinavian Welfare? User Satisfaction in Kindergartens

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The authors have requested retrospective open access for this paper. The original article has been corrected.     

Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism,anti-positivism,and modernist narrative in Patterson’s oeuvre

Theory and Society - This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work...     

Work–Family Balance and Tenure Reasonableness: Gender Differences in Faculty Assessment

Abstract

Perceptions of work–family balance and of the reasonableness of tenure expectations are key faculty retention factors. Using a national job satisfaction survey with 2438 tenure-track assistant professors, we explore whether faculty assessment of departmental and institutional support for family–work balance and their satisfaction with family-friendly policies influence their perceptions of the reasonableness of tenure expectations. We pay attention to the importance of gender in our models. Results reveal that women are less likely than men to report tenure expectations as scholars are reasonable and that departments and institutions are supportive of family–work balance. Departmental support for family–work balance, caring for an ill family member, satisfaction with family-friendly policies, and workload have the strongest association with reasonableness. Satisfaction with family-friendly policies has a significant relationship with reasonableness of tenure expectations only for faculty with family care responsibilities. Implications for family-friendly policies and practices in academia are discussed.     

Goal attainment in urban ecology research: A bibliometric review 1975–2004

We analyze a core literature of urban ecology (all articles published in Urban Ecology and Urban Ecosystems from 1975–2004, n = 261) to support a reflexive analysis of the field. We structure this critical analysis based on criteria derived from programmatic statements made by scientific societies, research funding organizations and academic institutions regarding what urban ecology should be. Specifically, we assess the extent to which the literature reflects, and has evolved to reflect, a commitment to

Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography: Lillian Wineman and the Trade in Dakota Beadwork, 1893–1929

Qualitative Sociology - How can researchers learn about the social lives of people and cultures who leave little or no written record of their lives? This article introduces the idea that one...