Developing Attitudes Toward the Role of Women

Abstract

In recent years, researchers have examined changes in attitudes toward the role of women, both among adults (Mason et al., 1976;Erskine, 1971;Ferree, 1974) and among college students (Parelius, 1975) and adolescents (Bush et al., 1977). Some have compared the attitudes of men and women (Osmond and Martin, 1975; Steinmann and Fox, 1970); others have examined the relationship of attitudes to demographic variables such as employment status, educational attainment (Mason and Bumpass, 1975) and academic field of study (Bayer, 1975). Yet, attitudes toward women's roles begin to develop long before people enter the world of work.

Sexual preference, feminism, and women's perceptions of their parents

“…Less is known specifically about the relationship feminists have had with their parents. Jean Stockard (1980) found, however, using scores on a feminism scale (Acker, Grether, Ewart-Tonkinson, Naffziger, Peterson, Skold, Silviera, & Stockard, 1974) as her measure, that more feminist college women reported "worse" relations with their fathers in high school than did more traditional women. She also found that feminists reported less similarity to and less frequent associations with the mother than nonfeminists and that both parents had more nontraditional sex-role related attitudes than those reported by the more traditional young women in the sample.…”

“…and respect for the daughter. Previous work on parental influences on sex-role related attitudes of college students has suggested that women who are more traditional in their attitudes Women's Perceptions of Their Parents s have fathers who are seen not only as "close" to them (Stockard, 1974(Stockard, , 1980 but also as very protective of them, and who do not encourage their being independent and who do not take them very seriously or respect them (Johnson, 1955(Johnson, , 1963. In terms of the present study, we hypothesized that heterosexual traditional women would report more protection from their fathers and less independence granting and respect than would feminist women.…”

“…Many studies guided by psychoanalytic, social learning, or social role perspectives have stressed the importance of parental behavior and attitudes in the development of sex typing, including sex-role attitudes and sexuality . 1 (For a summary of various perspectives as they apply to sexuality see Acosta (1975) and as they apply to sex-role attitudes see Stockard (1974).) While earlier research indicates that the nature of an individual's relationship with his or her parents may be related to both sexuality and sex-role attitudes, there has been little attempt to specify the possible differential relationship of parental variables to these two aspects of sex-role related behavior.…”

Changing Family Roles and Interactions

“…Women tend toward more liberal attitudes than men (Albrecht et Geerken and Gove, 1983;Cherlin and Walters, 1981;Osmond and Martin, 1975;Martin et al, 1980;Stockard, 1980;Tomeh, 1980;Thornton et al, 1983;Herzog et al, 1983).…”