"In Sweden, the debate on the problems of the family has progressed beyond the conflict between women's two roles -- in the home and on the job -- to encompass the two roles of men as well. Prepared by a team of six Scandinavian experts, this survey of contemporary attitudes of men and women at work and at home -- as solid as it is provocative -- serves to examine, illustrate, and dramatize the efforts on the part of the Swedish government to increase man's right to a larger position within the home, as well as woman's right to a career and family. First published in Sweden in 1962 and revised in an English edition in 1967, this book is one of the first to apply the 'dual role' approach to the question of sex roles. While 'foreign' in context, The Changing Roles of Men and Women presents a universal model for personal and humanized existence. The volume examines the family and married women who work, sex roles in the socialization process, parental role division and the child's personality, the position of men and women in the labor market, as well as an analysis of the debate on sex roles." -- Publisher description.

Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's lives over the past 50 years, with her usual "sly wit and unfussy style" (People). When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation. A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins's keen research--covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work--When Everything Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of "Help Wanted--Male" and "Help Wanted--Female" ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women's lives, partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way. Picking up where her highly lauded book America's Women left off, When Everything Changed is a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times columnist is known. Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were--"Father Knows Best" and "My Little Margie" on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston marathon, in combat zones, or in the police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams--some dashed and others realized beyond anyone's imagining.

How are men reacting to, perceiving, and behaving in light of the changes in gender roles. Here is an important volume that provides new and interesting reading about contemporary husbands and fathers. Men’s Changing Roles in the Family, offers an overview of the causes and consequences of changes in men’s family roles in recent decades. Experts introduce you to the issues, problems, and methods on the cutting edge of those disciplines that study men in the context of their families. Until now relatively little has been known empirically about men in contemporary families, and even less has been known about husbands and fathers from direct reports of the men themselves. This groundbreaking volume successfully closes this gap in the literature with an examination of the effects that fathers’growing involvement with their children have on their wives and themselves; a clinical assessment of some men’s angry reactions to separation and divorce and those special therapeutic goals and strategies that may help reduce their distress; examinations of the conflicting demands of the work world and the family upon some contemporary husbands and fathers and the negative effects of nonstandard work schedules upon men’s family life; and an examination of factors that make many men unhappy in patriarchal family structures. Men’s Changing Roles in the Family also contributes toward breaking new ground by examining family roles now performed by special groups of men. Finally, this important volume reports empirical findings about men in family-like relationships, illustrating evidence for the unique roles that male caregivers can offer children in day-care centers and reviewing current empirical studies of men’s friendships and their development.

In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist--who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society--challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation. In her new paradigm, gender is an institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Drawing on many schools of feminist scholarship and on research from anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, Lorber explores different paradoxes of gender: --why we speak of only two "opposite sexes" when there is such a variety of sexual behaviors and relationships; --why transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites do not affect the conceptualization of two genders and two sexes in Western societies; --why most of our cultural images of women are the way men see them and not the way women see themselves; --why all women in modern society are expected to have children and be the primary caretaker; --why domestic work is almost always the sole responsibility of wives, even when they earn more than half the family income; --why there are so few women in positions of authority, when women can be found in substantial numbers in many occupations and professions; --why women have not benefited from major social revolutions. Lorber argues that the whole point of the gender system today is to maintain structured gender inequality--to produce a subordinate class (women) that can be exploited as workers, sexual partners, childbearers, and emotional nurturers. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize economic, educational, and cultural resources or the positions of power.