The Importance of Fatherhood to U.S. Married and Cohabiting Men

Using a non-hierarchical approach to identity theory, we construct a scale to analyze the characteristics associated with the importance of fatherhood in a national sample of male partners (N = 932) of U.S. women of reproductive age, including fathers and non-fathers. OLS multiple regression shows that economic situation is not associated with importance of fatherhood, but valuing career success, higher education, higher religiosity and non-egalitarian gender attitudes (compared to egalitarian) are associated with higher importance of fatherhood scores. Leisure, age, fertility problems, and non-egalitarian gender attitudes are associated with importance of fatherhood scores differently for fathers and non-fathers. Although fathers place a higher value on fatherhood than do non-fathers, non-fathers, especially those who have experienced infertility, also have high importance of fatherhood scores

Variation in Attitudes toward Being a Mother by Race/Ethnicity and Education among Women in the United States

Do differences in experiences of motherhood (e.g., number of children, age at first child, and relationship type) by race/ethnicity and social class mean that attitudes toward motherhood also vary by social location? We examine attitudes toward being a mother among black, Hispanic, Asian, and white women of higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES, as measured by education). Results using the National Survey of Fertility Barriers (N = 4,796) indicate that, despite fertility differences, attitudes toward being a mother differ little between groups. White and Asian women have higher positive attitudes toward being a mother than black and Hispanic women. Only black women appear to distinguish between having and raising children; surprisingly, lower educated Hispanic women are less likely to think that they would be a mother, see motherhood as fulfilling, and think that it is important to have and to raise children compared with higher educated, white women

Cross-class families: Assessing the relative importance of the gender, status and income structures in the realm of marital power.

Research on marital power has been largely driven by resource, exchange, and New Home Economics perspectives. This project tests the usefulness of these theories by examining the "deviant case" of marriages: cross-class families. Married couples where wives' income and/or occupational status exceeds their husbands' were compared to couples with relatively equal status and income, and to couples where husbands' incomes and statuses were higher than their wives', in order to determine whether income, occupational status, or gender itself seemed to explain differences in the marital power dynamics across the various types of couples. Marital power dynamics were assumed to be expressed in the division of domestic labor, decision-making processes, and conflict resolution. Both spouses participated (30 couples in all), first by completing a brief self-administered questionnaire, modeled on Blood and Wolfe's fixed-choice format, and by participating in an in-depth interview. The results demonstrate clearly that gender is most strongly linked to marital power. Wives with 50% larger incomes than their husbands were not able to systematically exercise greater power in their relationships. The results for wives' status superiority were similar. Women were able to exercise power within a relationship if they had control over the family's surplus money; this was accomplished through a variety of financial arrangements. Similarly, if a couple seemed to agree (or if the husband alone thought) that the wife's work was "more important" on some level, she received more relief from the burden of domestic labor, though not a proportionate amount of relief, given her greater economic and status contributions. Couples went to great lengths to cover up the ways in which their marriages deviated from the traditional marital contract, largely by redefining what it meant to be "providing" for one's family, or what it meant to be a "good mother". These results support previous research that argues that women's resources are not worth as much culturally as are men's. The results also support previous research that suggests that marital power is more strongly related to the "idiosyncrasies" of individual marriages than to standard socio-economic variables, such as income and status.Ph.D.SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105039/1/9624747.pdfDescription of 9624747.pdf : Restricted to UM users only