Laura Hamilton

Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood Double Binds and Flawed Options

Current work on hooking up—or casual sexual activity on college campuses—takes an individualistic, “battle of the sexes” approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women’s sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs about women’s sexuality that reinforce male dominance across both hookups and committed relationships. The four-year university, however, also reflects a privileged path to adulthood. The authors show that it is characterized by a classed self-development imperative that discourages relationships but makes hooking up appealing. Experiences of this structural conflict vary. More privileged women struggle to meet gender and class guidelines for sexual behavior, placing them in double binds. Less privileged women find the class beliefs of the university foreign and hostile to their sexual and romantic logics.

Trading On Heterosexuality: College Women's Gender Strategies and Homophobia

In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from a womens floor in a university residence hall to examine how some heterosexual womens gender strategies contribute to their homophobia. The author describes a prevailing heterosexual erotic market on campus—the Greek party scene—and the status hierarchy linked to it. Within this hierarchy, heterosexual women assign lesbians low rank because of their assumed disinterest in the erotic market and perceived inability to acquire mens erotic attention. Active partiers invest more in this social world and prefer higher levels of social distance from lesbians than do others. These women also engage in same-sex eroticism primarily designated for a male audience. They define their behaviors as heterosexual, reducing the spaces in which lesbians can be comfortable. Finally, the author concludes by discussing the unique nature of womens homophobia and the links between sexism and heterosexism.

Adoptive Parents, Adaptive Parents: Evaluating the Importance of Biological Ties for Parental Investment

Contemporary legal and scholarly debates emphasize the importance of biological parents for childrens well-being. Scholarship in this vein often relies on stepparent families even though adoptive families provide an ideal opportunity to explore the role of biology in family life. In this study, we compare two-adoptive-parent families with other families on one key characteristic—parental investment. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten-First Grade Waves (ECLS-K), basic group comparisons reveal an adoptive advantage over all family types. This advantage is due in part to the socioeconomic differences between adoptive and other families. Once we control for these factors, two-adoptive-parent families invest at similar levels as two-biological-parent families but still at significantly higher levels in most resources than other types of families. These findings are inconsistent with the expectations of sociological family structure explanations, which highlight barriers to parental investment in nontraditional families, and evolutionary sciences kin selection theory, which maintains that parents are genetically predisposed to invest in biological children. Instead, these patterns suggest that adoptive parents enrich their childrens lives to compensate for the lack of biological ties and the extra challenges of adoption.

''Good Girls'': Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus

Women’s participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to social class—while also regulating sexual behavior and gender performance. High-status women employ slut discourse to assert class advantage, defining themselves as classy rather than trashy, while low-status women express class resentment—deriding rich, bitchy sluts for their exclusivity. Slut discourse enables, rather than constrains, sexual experimentation for the high-status women whose definitions prevail in the dominant social scene. This is a form of sexual privilege. In contrast, low-status women risk public shaming when they attempt to enter dominant social worlds.

More Is More or More Is Less? Parental Financial Investments during College

Evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance, but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement. Two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions. Some studies operate from a more-is-more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress. In contrast, a more-is-less perspective, rooted in a different model of rational behavior, suggests that parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement. I adjudicate between these frameworks, using data from nationally representative postsecondary datasets to determine what effect financial parental investments have on student GPA and degree completion. The findings suggest seemingly contradictory processes. Parental aid decreases student GPA, but it increases the odds of graduating—net of explanatory variables and accounting for alternative funding. Rather than strategically using resources in accordance with parental goals, or maximizing on their ability to avoid academic work, students are satisficing: they meet the criteria for adequacy on multiple fronts, rather than optimizing their chances for a particular outcome. As a result, students with parental funding often perform well enough to stay in school but dial down their academic efforts. I conclude by highlighting the importance of life stage and institutional context for parental investment.

Marital Name Change as a Window into Gender Attitudes

The need to revise scholars’ approach to the measurement of gender attitudes—long dominated by the separate-spheres paradigm—is growing increasingly timely as women’s share of the labor force approaches parity with men’s. Recent years have seen revived interest in marital name change as a gendered practice with the potential to aid in this task; however, scholars have yet to test its effectiveness as one possible indicator of gender attitudes. In this article we present views toward marital name change as a potential window into contemporary gender attitudes and most centrally as an illustration of the types of measures that hold great potential for attitudinal research. Using quantitative analyses from a national survey, we show that views on name change reflect expected sociodemographic cleavages and are more strongly linked to a wide array of other gender-related attitudes than are views regarding gendered separate spheres—even net of sociodemographic factors. We then turn to interlinked qualitative data to illustrate three reasons why name-change measures so effectively capture broader beliefs about gender. We conclude by looking at what attitudes about name change can tell us about future directions for the conceptualization and measurement of gender attitudes.

The Revised MRS Gender Complementarity at College

Using an ethnographic and longitudinal interview study of college women and in-depth interviews with their parents, I argue that mid-tier flagship universities still push women toward gender complementarity—a gender-traditional model of economic security pairing a career oriented man with a financially dependent woman. Combining multilevel and intersectional theories, I show that the infrastructure and campus peer culture at Midwest University supports this gendered logic of class reproduction, which reflects an affluent, white, and heterosexual femininity. I argue that this logic may only work for a minority of students, and plays a role in reinforcing class inequities among women.

Providing a ''Leg Up'': Parental Involvement and Opportunity Hoarding in College.

Although higher education scholars are increasingly exploring disparities within institutions, they have yet to examine how parental involvement contributes to social-class variation in students’ experiences. We ask, what role do parents play in producing divergent college experiences for students from different class backgrounds? Relying on interviews with 41 families, including mothers, fathers, and their daughters, we find that affluent parents serve as a ‘‘college concierge,’’ using class resources to provide youth with academic, social, and career support and access to exclusive university infrastructure. Less affluent parents, instead, describe themselves as ‘‘outsiders’’ who are unable to help their offspring and find the university unresponsive to their needs. Our findings suggest that affluent parents distinguish their children’s college experiences from those of peers, extending ‘‘effectively maintained inequality’’ beyond the K-12 education. Universities may be receptive of these efforts due to funding shifts that make recruiting affluent, out-of-state families desirable.

Changing Family, Changing Education

Sociologists of education increasingly have recognized the crucial role that families assume in children’s educational development. Meanwhile, sociologists have identified major changes in family structure and contemporary family life—among these, increases in the number of single-parent and step-parent families, families with older parents, and same-sex families, adoptive families, and multiracial families. These changes have compelled sociologists of education to redirect their attention from one that emphasizes a more standard—and increasingly outdated—notion of family to one that also takes into account the multiplicity of family forms. In this chapter, the authors identify some areas in which new lines of research on this front are currently under development. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: (1) to discuss various theoretical lens through which scholars have viewed family structure effects in education, (2) to report what existing and cutting-edge research has to say about how the changing shape and diversity of families affect children’s educational outcomes, and (3) to glean additional theoretical insights into how family structure shapes children’s educational outcomes. The authors also identify continuing challenges that scholars in this area face and pinpoint possible solutions to these challenges that hold the most promise.

The (Mis)Education of Monica and Karen

Monica and Karen, two typical in-state students starting college at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest, encounter organizational arrangements best designed to serve affluent, out-of-state partiers who can afford to pay full freight. Sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong discuss how Monica and Karen’s stories reveal the great mismatch between the needs of most college students and what many four-year residential universities offer.