Marie Cornwall

Working-Class Job Loss, Gender, and the Negotiation of Household Labor:

Scholars see the gendered division of household labor as a stronghold of gender inequality. We explore changes in household labor and gender relations when conservative, working-class families experience employment disruptions. Using data from 49 qualitative interviews conducted with men and women following the forced unemployment of breadwinning husbands, we observe some change in gendered household labor but conclude that a significant degendering of housework is thwarted by institutional-, interactive-, and individual-level processes. At the institutional level, the lack of well-paying jobs and the persistent gendering of household tasks discourage change. At the individual level, challenges to gendered identities encourage a reinforcement of traditional gender ideologies. At the interactional level, women’s responsibility for care work and the meaning of paid work for unemployed husbands forestall the adjustment of tasks.

Winning Woman Suffrage One Step at a Time: Social Movements and the Logic of the Legislative Process

We describe a theory of legislative logic. This logic is based on the observation that each succeeding stage of the legislative process has increasingly stringent rules and becomes more consequential. This logic unevenly distributes the influence of social movements across the legislative process. Social movements should have less influence at later stages where stringent requirements are more likely to exhaust limited resources and where the consequentiality of action will cause legislators to revoke their support. We apply the theory to a study of state-level woman suffrage legislation. We find that legislators responded to suffragists by bringing the issue of woman suffrage to the legislative forum, but once suffrage bills reached the voting stage, differences in social movement tactics and organization did not have as great an impact.

Changing Locus of Control: Steelworkers Adjusting to Forced Unemployment

Using an abbreviated version of Levensons (1981) locus of control scale, we examine change over time in the locus of control of displaced steelworkers. The first data collection occurred approximately six months after plant shutdown, the second occurred a year later. Utilizing a multidimensional measurement model, we test the major assumption that locus of control is a stable personality characteristic. The results of our analysis suggest that the measurement model is stable over time. However, we find evidence that locus of control changes over time. We argue that heightened perceptions of both internal and external control among men forced into unemployment may in part be a function of the reference group to which workers compare their perceived success or failure. Moreover, locus of control may be a function of the reality of institutional constraints in the face of unemployment.

Specialists and Generalists: Learning Strategies in the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1866–1918

We use collective learning theory to explain social movement strategic outcomes. Three movement strategies are conceptualized: insider, outsider, and generalist strategies. Generalist strategies are a combination of insider and outsider tactics. Movements learn in three main ways: retention of existing knowledge, adaptation based on past experiences, and via diffusion processes. Utilizing available data about the use of insider and outsider tactics in the state-level fight for woman suffrage, we find that state suffrage movements learned through retention of previously used strategies, adaptation in the face of major defeat, and through the diffusion of outsider tactics. Social movements exhibit structural inertia. Movement activists stick to what they know, unless they face a major defeat. Movement strategies are more complex and more flexible than suggested by the current focus in the social movement literature, suggesting the need to rethink the insider–outsider dichotomy.

Religion and Family Research in the Twenty-First Century

In the first Handbook of Marriage and the Family by Harold Christensen (1964), “religion” or “religion and family” is indexed only six times, though admittedly, these were early days for the study of religion and family. Herberg’s (1955) Protestant, Catholic, and Jew had been available for less than a decade and Lenski’s (1961) The Religious Factor had only recently been published. Thomas Luckmann had not yet published The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (1967) and Berger had not published The Sacred Canopy (1967).