Decomposing trends in attitudes toward gay marriage, 1988–2006

Objective. The objective of this article is to examine the trend in attitudes toward gay marriage through the analysis of data from the General Social Survey. Methods. Using linear decomposition techniques, I explain the change in attitudes toward gay marriage from 1988 to 2006. Results. Attitudes significantly liberalized over time; 71 percent opposed gay marriage in 1988, but by 2006, this figure dropped to 52 percent. Approximately two-thirds of this change was due to an intracohort change effect, or individuals' modifying their views over time, and one-third was due to a cohort succession effect, or later cohorts replacing earlier ones. This pattern was replicated across many subgroups of the U.S. public, including age, sex, residential, educational, and religious groups. Conclusion. The results suggest that the use of the “equality/tolerance” framing of gay marriage by its supporters and other societal events or “moments” may have convinced some people who used to disapprove of gay marriage in 1988 to approve of it by 2006.     

Female entrepreneurship: business,marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. These census data show that around 30% of the total business population was female, a considerably higher estimate than the current literature suggests. Female entrepreneurship was not a uniform experience. Certain demographics clustered in specific trades and within those sectors employers and own-account proprietors had strikingly different age, marital status and household profiles. A woman’s life cycle event such as marriage, motherhood and widowhood played an important role in her decision whether to work, the work available to her and the entrepreneurial choices she could make. While marriage and motherhood removed women from the labour force, they had less of an effect on their levels of entrepreneurship. Women who had young children were more entrepreneurial than those who had none, and entrepreneurship rates rose with the arrival of one child and continued to rise the more children were added to the family.