The Gender Revolution: A Framework for Understanding Changing Family and Demographic Behavior

This article argues that the trends normally linked with the second demographic transition (SDT) may be reversed as the gender revolution enters its second half by including men more centrally in the family. We develop a theoretical argument about the emerging consequences of this stage of the gender revolution and review research results that bear on it. The argument compares the determinants and consequences of recent family trends in industrialized societies provided by two narratives: the SDT and the gender revolution in the public and private spheres. Our argument examines differences in theoretical foundations and positive vs. negative implications for the future. We focus primarily on the growing evidence for turnarounds in the relationships between measures of women's human capital and union formation, fertility, and union dissolution, and consider evidence that men's home involvement increases union formation and fertility and decreases union instability. Although the family trends underlying the SDT and the gender revolution narratives are ongoing and a convincing view of the phenomenon has not yet emerged, the wide range of recent research results documenting changing, even reversing relationships suggests that the gender approach is increasingly the more fruitful one.     

Parenthood and Leaving Home in Young Adulthood

With increases in nonmarital fertility, the sequencing of transitions in early adulthood has become even more complex. Once the primary transition out of the parental home, marriage was first replaced by nonfamily living and cohabitation; more recently, many young adults have become parents before entering a coresidential union. Studies of leaving home, however, have not examined the role of early parenthood. Using the Young Adult Study of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (n = 4,674), we use logistic regression to analyze parenthood both as a correlate of leaving home and as a route from the home. We find that even in mid-adolescence, becoming a parent is linked with leaving home. Coming from a more affluent family is linked with leaving home via routes that do not involve children rather than those that do, and having a warm relationship with either a mother or a father retards leaving home, particularly to nonfamily living, but is not related to parental routes out of the home.     

Interpolating demography with families and households

This paper argues that the field of household and family demography serves a critical role in the development of our understanding of the determinants and consequences of population trends. Like the community, families and households are situated between the two levels at which demographic research is ordinarily conducted — the individual and the nation-state. The results of the papers in this issue are used to illustrate the critical ways that intergenerational and gender relationships shape demographic processes.     

DO MEN “NEED” A SPOUSE MORE THAN WOMEN?: PERCEPTIONS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF MARRIAGE FOR MEN AND WOMEN

This study examines how important men and women feel marriage is for men and for women. Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households, we find that both men and women feel that men need to be married more than women do. Women are more likely than men to think that both men and women can have satisfying lives without marriage, but they are also more likely to think that only women can have satisfying lives without marriage. Younger, more educated people are less likely to emphasize marriage. On the other hand, religious people and those who are married with children are particularly likely to think that neither men nor women can have satisfying lives without marriage.     

Growing Parental Economic Power in Parent–Adult Child Households: Coresidence and Financial Dependency in the United States, 1960–2010

Research on coresidence between parents and their adult children in the United States has challenged the myth that elders are the primary beneficiaries, instead showing that intergenerationally extended households generally benefit the younger generation more than their parents. Nevertheless, the economic fortunes of those at the older and younger ends of the adult life course have shifted in the second half of the twentieth century, with increasing financial well-being among older adults and greater financial strain among younger adults. This article uses U.S. census and American Community Survey (ACS) data to examine the extent to which changes in generational financial well-being over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been reflected in the likelihood of coresidence and financial dependency in parent–adult child U.S. households between 1960 and 2010. We find that younger adults have become more financially dependent on their parents and that while older adults have become more financially independent of their adult children, they nevertheless coreside with their needy adult children. We also find that the effect of economic considerations in decisions about coresidence became increasingly salient for younger adults, but decreasingly so for older adults.     

The racial crossover in family complexity in the United States

This article examines the evolution of the black extended family by documenting a black-white crossover in the proportions of unmarried adults living in complex households after the middle of the twentieth century. We demonstrate significant racial differences in the trends in complex house-hold residence over the life course, characterized by far greater declines in complex living among whites, particularly at younger ages. In this context, the higher level of family extension that recent research has found typifies black families is both a relatively new phenomenon and one that is not just limited to single-parent families; it characterizes all ages, those with and without children, and men as well as women.     

Fertility of the jews

The objectives of this paper were to review and summarize the existing literature on Jewish fertility and to discuss the highlights of data on fertility trends and differentials based on survey data obtained on the Jewish population of the metropolitan area of Providence, Rhode Island. The literature consistently confirmed the finding of lower fertility among Jews since the 1880's in the United States and for the last seventy-five years in a variety of European countries.A review of available data on fertility trends and differentials within the Jewish population indicated contradictory and inconsistent findings. The Providence survey data pointed to changing patterns of fertility among Jews and clarified a number of seeming inconsistencies. These data suggested (1) the pre-World War II decline and postwar recovery of Jewish fertility; (2) the change from an inverse relationship of social class and Jewish fertility among first-generation Jews to a direct relationship among second- and third-generation Jews; (3) the changing relationship of religiosity and Jewish fertility, which reflects social class changes.Finally, an attempt is made to clarify the interpretation of these and related findings by placing the analysis of Jewish fertility in the context of assimilation and acculturation.     

Gender roles,marriage, and residential independence

This article examines the effects of gender role attitudes on leaving home for marriage and for unmarried independence among young men and women in the United States in the 1980s. The choice to leave home for unmarried independence is associated with two major changes in family relationships: the shift in parent-child interaction from a traditional emphasis on children's obedience toward a greater stress on independence, and the shift toward more egalitarian definitions of gender roles in both work and family spheres. We ask the following: What is the effect of holding more modern gender role attitudes on gender differences in leaving home for marriage? Does holding more modern gender role attitudes influence patterns of leaving home for marriage and for unmarried independence differently for men and women? We examine these questions with data from sophomores in the High School and Beyond Survey.