Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition

Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition. Barbara Risman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1998. 189 pp. ISBN 0-300-07215-5. 25. 00 cloth. This work is a mix of feminist gender arguments, extensive literature reviews, and empirical research directed toward eliminating gender inequality. Readers who hold feminist views will find strong arguments and consistent presentations for most of the book. Readers not sympathetic to the uncritical social construction of gender and the easy dismissal of contemporary sociological and psychological research indicating biological underlays for sex differences will be less persuaded. The major propositions are: There is a pervasive gender structure determining gendered behaviors and relationships between the sexes that is social in origin; gendered behavior results from actors meeting situational expectations, not from socialization; elimination of differences and reversal of roles in the family are possible and desirable; and socialization in egalitarian or single-parent families has no detrimental effect on children. Three different data sets and four analyses are presented to test these propositions. The reporting of the quantitative and qualitative research is characterized by careful, honest, and open discussion of the limitations of samples and designs and of the limited amount of variance actually explained. On the other hand, the relationships among theory, hypotheses, and specific evidence, and between results and conclusions are neither clearly explicated nor tightly drawn. The first proposition is not directly tested and is not directly germane to the reported analyses. The second and third are elevated in two studies. In the first, the effect of parental circumstances on mothering by women and men is examined. Mothering is measured by housework (the degree to which the parent takes responsibility for carrying out the various aspects of housework), intimacy with children (sharing emotions and concerns), and affection (spending time with and showing physical affection for children). A clearly nonrandom, recruited volunteer sample is classified in terms of parenting: primary (reluctant single fathers; single mothers; homemakers), shared (both spouses with full-time jobs), and traditional fathers (the comparison group for the preceding). The results are not inconsistent with the general proposition but do not clearly support the uniqueness of the situational explanation. Primary parenting is related to taking responsibility for housework, but is not related to affection nor to intimacy and only for males. Sex is related to both housework and affection, femininity is the best predictor of intimacy. The author argues that these results, combined with other replicating research, lead to the conclusion men can mother as well as women. …