1. Whyte, Status of Women, see especially the concluding chapter. Whyte is very leery of making cross-cultural generalizations concerning the status of women because so many different variables are involved, but he does tend to argue that the agrarian societies were generally more oppressive than both simpler and more complex modern societies. [BACK]

2. Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, pp. 116-18. For a classic discussion of the characteristics of matrilineal societies, see Schneider, "Matrilineal Descent Groups." [BACK]

3. Collins, "Conflict Theory of Sexual Stratification." G. Johnson and Hendrix, "Test of Collins's Theory." [BACK]

4. Reiss, "Sociological Journey into Sexuality," especially p. 236. See also Journey into Sexuality . [BACK]

5. Witherspoon, Navajo Kinship and Marriage . [BACK]

6. I am indebted to Estep, "Feminist Consciousness and Navajo World View," for this general picture. [BACK]

7. Schlegel, "Male and Female in Hopi Thought." [BACK]

8. Weiner, "Trobriand Descent." break [BACK]

9. Coltrane, "Father-Child Relationship." [BACK]

10. Quoted in Tanner, "Matrifocality," p. 156. [BACK]

11. Toni Morrison is quoted in Hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 50. [BACK]

12. African kinship provides a sharp contrast to the husband/father-headed family with which we are familiar. In many African societies, bridewealth circulates around the society and represents the reciprocal obligations of one corporate kin group to another. Women work for their husbands but do not own the products of this work as a family member; their ties are to their own kin group. Women engage in joint work activities with other women, and a woman can pass on property to her children separately from her husband. In this system the idea of father as we know it does not exist. Although the degree of gender equality existing in African societies is complex and controversial, women are definitely not juvenilized as they are under patriarchal systems. See especially Sacks, Sisters and Wives . [BACK]

13. D. Lewis, "The Black Family," p. 229 (quoted). [BACK]

14. Hartmann, "Marxism and Feminism," p. 18. [BACK]

15. Ortner, "Virgin and State," especially p. 29. [BACK]

16. Bakan, They Took Themselves Wives, especially p. 14. [BACK]

17. See especially Hamilton, Liberation of Women . [BACK]

18. Bernard, Future of Marriage, p. 335. [BACK]

19. Quoted in Demos, "Changing Faces of Fatherhood," especially p. 432. [BACK]

20. Degler, At Odds, p. 74. [BACK]

21. Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 218. [BACK]

22. Smith-Rosenberg, "New Woman as Androgyne," in Disorderly Conduct, especially pp. 253 and 256. [BACK]

23. It is interesting that Betty Friedan in the early days of renewed feminism referred to the "lavender menace" as a threat to the Women's Movement. Fortunately, Friedan later changed her position and "accepted" diversity within the movement. [BACK]

24. Lundberg and Farnham, Modern Woman, p. 167. [BACK]

25. Laslett, "Family Membership." [BACK]

26. Parsons, "Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States," in his Essays in Sociological Theory, pp. 89-103, especially p. 98. [BACK]

27. Oppenheimer, "Women's Economic Role in Family," challenges this view with the argument that strain might not arise in a two-career family if there was no norm against wives' working. [BACK]

28. Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 255. [BACK]

29. Heer and Grossbard-Shectman, "Female Marriage Squeeze." See also Guttentag and Secord, Too Many Women? break [BACK]

30. Surveys conducted in 1982 and 1987 on random samples of all non-foreign University of Oregon undergraduates twenty-three years old and under show that in both years the males were more likely than the females to have fathers with only a high school education or less. (Findings of the Sociology Department's graduate seminar in survey methods, taught by Patricia Gwartney-Gibbs.) See also B. Johnson, "Sex Differences in College Aspirations." [BACK]

31. Flacks, Youth and Social Change, p. 32. [BACK]

32. Gordon, "Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family," p. 41. [BACK]

33. Pleck continues to be optimistic. He believes we are seeing an increase in fathers' time spent in the family, but only because he takes decreasing family size into account. Generally, however, even Pleck would have to agree that what little convergence there is in men's and women's family time is due far more to working women's decrease in time spent in the home than to men's increase in time spent working in the home. See his Working Wives/Working Husbands. A more recent study (Barnett and Baruch, "Fathers' Participation in Family Work") finds that maternal employment status does not directly predict father involvement but rather creates the conditions under which other variables emerge as significant predictors within the employed and unemployed groups. [BACK]

35. Parsons, "Age and Sex," p. 94, n. 4. [BACK]

36. Wallerstein and Kelly, Surviving the Breakup. See also Kelly, "Divorce: The Adult Perspective." [BACK]

37. It is true that there has been an increase in men who file for divorce since no-fault divorce laws were put into effect, but who files for divorce is a separate issue from who found the marriage the most unsatisfactory. See Dixon and Weitzman, "When Husbands File for Divorce." [BACK]

38. Kitson and Sussman, "Marital Complaints," p. 93. This was the third most common response for men and the twenty-ninth most common for women. [BACK]

39. See also Levinger, "Sources of Marital Dissatisfaction." [BACK]