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surveys generally try to avoid shocking the people they interview and by now they bor-
der on old-fashioned. As society has outpaced the constraints of these questions, feminists
and other advocates have introduced new issues.3 Obsolete or not, the questions do pro-
vide measures for social change across the three decades, as we see in Figure 9.1.4 Change
is the dominant message in each figure, though the rate of increase on three of the four
items slowed in the 1990s. We should not ascribe the slowdown to its having maxed out,
either, as the woman president item highest from the start is the one that continued
upward until the series was discontinued.
The differences among items hint at the Conservative Protestants somewhat dif-
ferent take on gender-role equity. On three of the four items the three that mention
politics Catholics are the most liberal and Conservative Protestants the most conserva-
tive in each year. The frequency of feminist responses for both groups increased each
year from 1974 to 1992 then leveled off. The average gap between them is 15 percentage
points, and the trends neither converge nor diverge. Mainline Protestants are not statisti-
cally different from the Catholics (though slightly below) on each item. Afro-American
Protestants closely resemble the Conservative Protestants on the first item ( leave running
the country up to the men), Mainline Protestants on the third item (vote for a woman),
and split the difference on the fourth (men better suited).
These trends developed in a context in which women s public roles as elected of-
ficials, spokespersons for causes, and administrators in government, the nonprofit sec-
tor, and business all expanded exponentially. Opinions about women in public life may
have pressured some institutions to open up while the trends gave other institutions the
freedom to promote women without fear of public backlash. Yet in all these changes,
Conservative Protestant women held back. They did not go off in the opposite direction,
they kept up, but they never caught up with Catholics or Mainline Protestants. On each
of these three items about women in public life, Conservative Protestants support looks
like Catholic women s support did eight or ten years earlier.
The second question should women be allowed to take paying jobs differs from
the other three in several ways. First, it makes no mention of public life. Second, religion
did not affect answers to this question as much as the others, even in the early 1970s.
Third, Afro-American Protestants (the group with the highest married women s labor
force participation rate in the first decade of the series) changed the least. Fourth, and
most important for our purposes, the Conservative Protestants increased the most on
this item so that the gap between them and Catholics and Mainline Protestants is not
statistically (or substantively) significant after 1994.
The difference between the three public-sphere items and the private-sphere one
suggests that a significant minority of Conservative Protestants dissent from women s
growing public prominence. We would suspect partisanship if all prominent women
were Democrats. But of course they are not. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and
talk show host Ann Coulter arrived too late to affect these trends; the action here is
in the 1970s and 1980s. That was when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the
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118 Part II " Sex and Gender
Women should take care of their homes Married women earning money
100 100
75 75
50 50
25 25
0 0
1972 1980 1988 1996 2004 1972 1980 1988 1996 2004
Year Year
Woman president Men better suited emotionally for politics
100 100
75 75
50 50
25 25
0 0
1972 1980 1988 1996 2004 1972 1980 1988 1996 2004
Year Year
Conservative Protestant
Afro-American Protestant
Mainline Protestant
Catholic
FIGURE 9.1 Feminism Scale Items by Year and Denomination
Note: Data-smoothed using locally estimated regression.
United Kingdom, the U.S. Senate had four Republican women; and Peggy Noonan
wrote speeches for President Reagan. One can expect therefore as this analysis proceeds
that the conservatives will lag behind the Mainline Protestants in their sympathy for the
equality of women, but not far behind.
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Approve (%)
Disagree (%)
Disagree (%)
Would vote for her (%)
Chapter 3 " Changing Gender Roles 119
WIFE AND HUSBAND
In 1996 GSS asked three questions that presented paradigms for marital relationships:
" A relationship where the man has the main responsibility for providing the house-
hold income and the woman has the main responsibility for taking care of the home
and family.
OR
" A relationship where the man and the woman equally share responsibility for pro-
viding the household income and taking care of the family.
" Relationship in which the man and the woman do most things in their social life
together.
OR
" Relationship where the man and the woman do separate things that interest them.
" A relationship where the man and the woman are emotionally dependent on one
another.
OR
" A relationship in which the man and the woman are emotionally independent.
The first and third pairings tap the soft patriarchy that Wilcox (2004) identified.
Both render the husband and wife dependent on one another. While a minority of Con-
servative Protestants chose the male breadwinner/female homemaker model, at 41 per-
cent it is a much more popular option for those families than for others; 24 percent of
Afro-American Protestants, 25 percent of Catholics, and 31 percent of Mainline Protes-
tants chose the breadwinner/homemaker model. Likewise a bare majority (52 percent) of
Conservative Protestants opted for emotional (inter)dependence over independence while
minorities of other faiths made that choice; 45 percent of Afro-American Protestants, 41
percent of Mainline Protestants, and 44 percent of Catholics. Differences by denomina-
tion in the middle pairing are not statistically significant.
Combining the two items that do differ into a three-point scale we discover three
things: (1) Women in all denominations opt out of the traditional model more than men
do. (2) Conservative Protestants differ from other denominations more than the other
denominations differ among themselves. (3) The EVANGELICAL scale accounts for only
28 percent of the Conservatives traditionalism. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]