Women who farm: A preliminary portrait

Nearly 500,000 women are engaged in farm work. Although the majority are unpaid family workers, in recent years greater proportions are in salaried and managerial positions. In-depth interviews with farming women in Baca County, Colorado, however, suggest that wage classification has negligible predictive value in explaining a woman's attitude toward farm work. Satisfaction with doing men's work depends on early socialization experiences and the degree to which a woman adopts the traditional female value system. The relevance of a masculinity—femininity dimension to distinguish women with career versus homemaking proclivities is demonstrated.An earlier version of this article was presented at the New Horizons for Women in Work and the Professions Panel of the Sociologists for Women in Society sessions at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City, August 28, 1976.     

Volunteerism as an aspect of women's work lives

Results of a mail survey of 292 female volunteers, aged 23–44, indicate that the role of volunteer work may be that of consciously chosen primary work, a supplement to primary work, or a vehicle for entry or return to employment. The three roles are associated with differences in relationship to the labor market, satisfactions sought, nature and amount of volunteer work done, satisfaction, involvement, commitment, and plans for continued membership. The survey instrument incorporated the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, which was evaluated for its applicability to a volunteer population.     

Imaging,empathy, and causal attribution

Three studies were conducted to test whether imagery accounts for the effects of empathy on attributions, that is, whether attributers construct and scan a mental image of social scenarios the same way that actual participants scan a real environment. According to this interpretation, attributers “see” the world as the participant does and make vicarious attributions. An alternative interpretation holds that subjects base vicarious attributions on recreating the motivations and affect of the actor, so that imaging is irrelevant to empathy and attributions. In the first study, subjects who imagined a story from the perspective of a particular character later showed differential recall of story details as a function of role, but not differential attributions. In Experiment 2, role-taking subjects showed clear effects of imaged perspective on recall for story details, but no effects on attributions of causality for an accident. Further, recall and attribution were uncorrelated. In the last study, empathy and imagery role-taking instructions produced independent effects: imagers showed pronounced perspective-relevant recall and empathizers did not. Neither showed unambiguous vicarious attributions. Recall and attribution were again uncorrelated. These studies suggest that the imagery explanation of empathy effects is untenable, and imply that the recall of perspective-relevant details is unlikely to mediate attributions of causality in imaginary scenarios.