The voices in children's literature: The impact of gender on the moral decisions of storybook characters

The study examined the moral and self orientations of 212 male and female characters in 50 works of fiction for school-aged children. A modified version of Lyons' coding scheme was used for differentiating between Justice and Care moral orientations, and Separate/Objective and Connected self orientations. It was hypothesized that male characters would demonstrate Justice morality and a Separate/Objective self, whereas female characters would demonstrate Care morality and a Connected self, regardless of sex of author. The results confirmed the hypotheses. The importance of literature in providing symbolic models of moral decisioning and the need to expand children's moral orientations beyond gender-linked stereotypes was discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 1988, New Orleans, Louisiana.     

The relationship between sex role identity and marital adjustment

One hundred forty-four maritally distressed clinic couples and 138 nonclinic couples participated in a study investigating the relationship between individual sex role identity and marital adjustment. Subjects completed Baucom's (1976) masculinity (MSC) and femininity (FMN) scales, and either the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; Spanier, 1976) or the Marital Adjustment Scale (MAS; Locke & Wallace, 1959). As predicted, femininity was related to positive marital adjustment; masculinity was related as well, but perhaps to a lesser degree. Androgyny within a relationship was found to be highly desirable, whereas marriages involving undifferentiated individuals were more likely to be distressed.     

The initial social encounters of high and low social effectiveness school-aged children

The initial social encounters of 30 pairs of unacquainted high/high, high/low, and low/low popularity status third- and fourth-grade boys and girls were observed in an analogue free-play setting. Pairwise comparisons revealed that the dyads did not differ according to pairing on the exchange of global play information. The low/low popularity dyads, as compared to the high/high and the high/low popularity dyads, exchanged significantly less personal information as indexed by both the patterns and the content of personal information exchange. Analyses revealed no differences between the high/high and high/low dyads on the patterns and content of personal information exchange. However, as compared to the high/high dyads, the high/low dyads and the low/low dyads were less likely to evidence a pattern of initial steps in their social encounters that began with greeting and introduction and that was followed by the exchange of play information. The observations of the high/high dyads were considered as a model for developing social skills training programs designed to facilitate acquaintanceship development, and the need for further research on the processes underlying peer pairing and the components of social skillfulness was discussed.     

Women returning to school: The consequences of multiple roles

Previous research suggests that strain is a predominant consequence of multiple-role incumbency. The likelihood of negative outcomes is increased when the role combination is non-normative. The validity of these assertions is tested for a group of women who have returned to school at midlife, comparing them to a group of their neighbors who are primarily housewives. Findings demonstrate that the students experienced significantly greater positive outcomes or gratifications from their multiple roles than the housewives experienced from their relatively unitary roles. However, the students also reported significantly more negative consequences or strain than did the housewives. Though the students had a net positive gain, the difference was not significant. Moreover, role strain was negatively correlated with high levels of involvement in leisure and volunteer activities for both subsamples. Finally, feminist ideology varied directly with gratification for both students and housewives. The mix of positive and negative corollaries of multiple roles challenges the assumption in the literature that strain is an ubiquitous outcome. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of sexual division of labor and strategies for enhancing net gratification.I am grateful to Judith Long for her assistance in conceptualizing and designing this research. Anne Foner, Peggy A. Thoits, and anonymous reviewers for Sex Roles made numerous helpful comments which strengthened the final version. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Antonio, Texas, August 1984.     

The Eschatological Turn in German Philosophy

This article argues that modern European philosophy was significantly shaped by the transposition of eschatology from a theological into a philosophical register. By ‘eschatology’, I here mean thought about the ‘last things’ as they relate to present systems of life and action; and about those systems as determined, at least in part, by their end. I take as my starting point the claim that the scepticism regarding revelation that was such a central characteristic of the Enlightenment did not eradicate the importance of eschatology as a structuring frame of historical and moral thought, but merely changed it. Modern theologians and philosophers tended to shift the ground of eschatology from revelation to the inner logic of a system; eschatology was seen as legitimated by, and in turn legitimating, the shape of a given philosophical account of history. The questions and challenges arising from this shift were important drivers of early twentieth‐century European philosophy. This article works out this claim through indicative accounts of several large debates of early twentieth‐century philosophies of history and of politics as contestations about the meaning of eschatology: the crisis of historicism, the rise of existentialism, and the surge of political religions. It concludes with a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s eschatological thought of the 1930s, illuminated by the recent publication of his Black Notebooks.