Mad, Bad, or Reasonable? Newspaper Portrayals of the Battered Woman Who Kills

A heated debate about battered women who kill abusive male partners started in the 1970s. In this study, we tracked the public discourse on battered women who kill by coding 250 newspaper articles published between 1978 and 2002. Using four typifying models, we found that leading explanations for why battered women kill medicalized then criminalized their actions; they were mad then bad. We also found that reporters used quotes from claims makers supporting conventional or medical typifications of battered women to a much greater degree than statements from alternative, feminist sources. In conclusion, simplified, sensational and conventional understandings of crime causation drove the social construction of “the battered woman who kills”. She may be mad or bad, but rarely has she been portrayed as reasonable. Suggestions for promoting feminist narrative in the media are also provided.     

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE AND A DECADE OF PUBLISHED RESEARCH IN SOCIOLOGY JOURNALS

In the mid to early 1970s feminist writers raised four major criticisms about sociological research on women and expressed concern about the related issue of the discipline's treatment of women sociologists. Critics charged that sociological research underrepresented women as subjects, concentrated on research topics more central to men's than to women's lives, used concepts, paradigms, methods, and theories better portraying men's than women's lives, and used men and male experience as norms against which all social experience was assessed. Examination of published research in ten major sociology journals the 1974–83 period suggests that some concerns articulated in the critiques are reflected in subsequent published work, but others have had little or only limited impact. Findings suggest an association between women's participation as editors, board members, and authors in journals and the quantity and character of published gender articles.     

Children's time in household work: Estimation issues

The purpose of this article is to analyze children's time in household production using tobit analysis to adjust for nonparticipation and to compare the results to a regression analysis. In general, more variables are significant in each of the analyses based upon gender and birth order of the children. More importantly, the additional variables go beyond whether the day was a schoolday and the age of the child. The past failure of children's time spent in household work to change with differences in their families' characteristics appears to have been an artifact of not accounting for nonparticipation when estimating marginal effects.Her current research interests include use of clothes washers and family members' time use. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.She is currently conducting research in the areas of home-based employment and small family businesses.     

The relative career advancement of men and women engineers in the United States

Abstract

Despite the fact that women engineering students perform as well as their male classmates during college, women engineers report lower salaries and supervisory responsibility levels after about five years in the labour force. Several hypotheses concerning the reasons for the differences in career advancement of men and women engineers were investigated in a national survey of engineers in the United States. The gender differences in career advancement could not be explained by differences in education level or in self-perceptions of ability. The fact that women were more likely to have taken a career break than were men did decrease their salaries and supervisory levels. However, gender differences were still apparent even when this factor was controlled. The careers of both men and women were affected by conflicts arising from the multiple roles of worker, spouse, and parent, but many women engineers avoided such conflicts by remaining single and childless. These results challenge several popular explanations for the differential advancement of men and women, but the actual causes remain unknown.