Feminists have re-visioned women as active subjects in knowledge by granting them agency and diversity and by challenging divisions like public versus private. But both feminist and traditional knowledge remain deeply adult centered. Adult perspectives infuse three contemporary images of children: as threats to adult society, as victims of adults, and as learners of adult culture. We can bring children more fully into knowledge by clarifying ideological constructions, with attention to the diversity of children's actual lives and circumstances; by emphasizing (...) children's agency as well as their subordination; and by challenging their conceptual privatization. The re-visioning of children involves complex issues of gender, generation, autonomy, and relatedness. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes labor force exits as a parallel option to employer changes in the gender-specific opportunity structure for employed young women. It argues that the same working conditions should predict both employment exits and employer changes. Family characteristics, rather than working conditions, should differentiate between job changers and job leavers. These hypotheses were tested with 1970-1980 data from the National Longitudinal Survey. Results from logit analyses showed that employment conditions do affect young women's decisions to change jobs or exit (...) the labor force, and influence them in similar ways, and that household factors affect labor force exits more strongly than they do job changes. While pregnant women are more likely to leave the labor force, both improved job conditions and existing preschool children enhance the likelihood of continuous employment for pregnant women. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between married women's waged labor and their position in the racial stratification order, comparing Chinese-Canadians in British Columbia and Chinese-Americans in California and Hawaii. It utilizes a theoretical perspective that sees gender as differentially constructed within ethnic groups and as reflecting the interaction of group heritage, historical experiences, and location in the stratification order. Both historical and current census data are examined. Chinese women had initially low rates of participation in the waged labor force. They (...) first functioned as unpaid labor in family enterprises, entering the waged labor force only after the decline of the era of ethnic enterprise. This may initially have been a response to the limited earning capacity of Chinese males, but women remained there even after husbands' income improved. It would appear that the Chinese community initially possessed a set of norms comparable to the cult of domesticity, but their experiences in North America produced a normative transformation. They shifted from believing that “a married woman's place was in the home” to believing that “a married woman has an obligation to work and help support her family.”. (shrink)

This article examines the ways that managers in a rapidly globalizing industry use gendered discourses of skill to justify and frame their search for inexperienced workers in low-wage regions, using a case of a U.S.-based apparel firm that relocated and subcontracted its sewing operations in the 1990s. It uses feminist theory to examine managers' claims that women's sewing skills in the United States were disappearing and that they needed to seek out these skills in parts of the world where women (...) were not yet active participants in labor markets. Feminist researchers have long understood the ways that naturalization of skill cheapens women's labor. The case presented here highlights the way in which the portrayal of certain skills as naturally occurring resources justifies the movement of capital in search of new pools of workers without labor market experience or union representation. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate how sex segregation, social class, and gender are analytically related to occupational stratification. Recent discussions of women and men in the labor force revolve around whether a sex-segregated model in which sex of the worker affects placement, a pure social class model using classical criteria, or a gendered social class model in which social organizational processes of a gendered social class structure affect positioning in the stratification system. This article addresses the influence (...) that social class and gender have on stratification in the labor market. Data from the 1972-82 General Social Survey on 371 occupations, representing 7,541 male and female workers, are used to formulate a social class scheme based on all workers' characteristics. In comparing the models, the analyses show that an integrated gendered social class perspective is consistent with the empirical differentiation found among women and men in the labor force. (shrink)

A complex conjuncture of ideological constructions obscured and rationalized the systematic exploitation of farm women. First, farming and homemaking, to which people cling in an attempt to avert the alienation of wage labor, provide a basis for evaluating one's labor in terms that, ironically, makes them vulnerable to super-exploitation. Second, agrarian ideologies, with their strongly patriarchal bias, did not allow women to understand themselves as public actors. Modernizing elite ideologies, specifically the equation of entrepreneurial individualism and efficiency with “progress” and (...) affluence, and the “cult of domesticity” with its redefinition of men's and women's roles, promised women greater equality within the family; however, these normative codes simultaneously opened the farm and home to greater dependence on capitalist markets. The ideology of entrepreneurial individualism also provided templates through which farm men and women (mis)understood their relative poverty as being the result of private, individual choices. In addition, virtually all media assumed a sector differentiated only by commodity, rendering size, class, or other distinctions invisible. Finally, the ideology of separate spheres, as it developed in the nineteenth century, created a segmented and discriminatory labor market for women. The period focused on, the late 1940s and the 1950s, was crucial in establishing the terms of the post-War order. (shrink)