Job Leaves and the Limits of the Family and Medical Leave Act

This article examines the need for and use of leaves designated by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Using national data, we show that women, parents, those with little income, and African Americans are particularly likely to perceive a need for job leaves. However, it is married—not single—women and Whites who are particularly likely to take such leaves. The authors suggest that this disjunction between need and use is a consequence of the construction of leave policy—that it provides for only short, unpaid leaves for a narrow slice of workers and those politically constructed as “family”—and the unresponsiveness of workplaces. These limits likely reinforce inequality based on gender, race, and family status.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69106/2/10.1177_0730888499026004006.pd

Bridging Alone: Religious Conservatism, Marital Homogamy, and Voluntary Association Membership

This study characterizes social insularity of religiously conservative American married couples by examining patterns of voluntary associationmembership. Constructing a dataset of 3938 marital dyads from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, the author investigates whether conservative religious homogamy encourages membership in religious voluntary groups and discourages membership in secular voluntary groups. Results indicate that couples’ shared affiliation with conservative denominations, paired with beliefs in biblical authority and inerrancy, increases the likelihood of religious group membership for husbands and wives and reduces the likelihood of secular group membership for wives, but not for husbands. The social insularity of conservative religious groups appears to be reinforced by homogamy—particularly by wives who share faith with husbands

The Third Shift: Gender, Employment, and Care Work Outside the Home

Caregiving remains women’s work far more than men’s. Although women and men often attribute this difference to “nature,” this paper argues for the importance of structure, especially in employment. At least to some extent, women’s employment—especially in jobs similar to men’s—reduces the care work they do for kin, if not for friends. Examining the different amount and meanings that women and men—like Euro-Americans and African Americans—ascribe to care work, I suggest we view such care work as a survival strategy as well as a demanding labor of love. In this context, recent social policies should be seen as not only privatizing care but also producing growing inequality as well as a vacuum of care

Rethinking Families and Community: The Color, Class, and Centrality of Extended Kin Ties

Although a focus on marriage and the nuclear family characterizes much sociological research and social commentary, this article suggests that this focus ignores the familial experiences of many Americans, particularly those on the lower end of the economic spectrum for whom extended kin are central. African Americans and Latinos/as are more involved with kin than whites, but class trumps race in this regard: African Americans, Latinos/as, and whites with fewer economic resources rely more on extended kin than do those more affluent. The emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family may actually promulgate a vision of family life that dismisses the very social resources and community ties that are critical to the survival strategies of those in need. In contrast to those who have argued that marriage is the foundation of the community or even, in that overused phrase, the “basic unit of society,” this article suggests that marriage actually detracts from social ties to broader communities just as an emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family, to the exclusion of the extended family, distorts and reduces the power and reach of social policy