Maxine Baca Zinn

Feminism and Family Studies for a New Century

Feminism has revolutionized family studies. This article traces the impact of feminism on the family field in the last quarter of the twentieth century, focusing on (1) academic representations of the family before feminism; (2) second-wave feminisms unmasking of the gender-structured family; (3) how feminist pluralism enlarged the family field; (4) current feminist debates on family diversity and change; and (5) connections between feminist scholarship on the family and public policy.

The sexist naming of collegiate athletic teams and resistance to change.

Colleges and universities use nicknames, logos, and mascots as identifying and unifying symbols, especially surrounding their athletic teams. More than half of U. S. colleges and universities use sexist names and mascots for their womens athletic teams. We argue that these naming practices define, deprecate, and excude women. We show how these linguistic marking systems adopted by schools promote male supremacy and female subordination. They do so, just as sexist language does, by trivializing women, diminish ing them, and making them invisible. A case study of one university is presented where the name for male and female teams is a ram—a male sheep. When this name was identified in the school newspaper as sexist, various constituencies rallied to retain the traditional name. Their defenses are examined, looking especially at the parallels between these arguments and those used to resist changing sexist language in general.

Transforming Sociology through Textbooks: Making the Discipline More Inclusive

We began by discussing structural differences between professors and students. We suggested that these can be neither denied nor ignored, and ought not be magnified; such tactics can jeopardize the pedagogical task. We argued that ethical teaching presumes acknowledging inequality and meritocratic elitism. It entails making and maintaining clear distinctions between roles. In our opinion, ethical teaching begins with honesty and avoids deceptive conceptions of the student-professor relationship. It requires professors to monitor and manage their relations with students, to regulate degrees of informality, and to discriminate between friendliness and friendship. Ethical professors avoid casting students as peers because of misplaced egalitarian impulses or personal needs for popularity and approval. Ethical professors do not use students, and they guard against the damaging implications of customer-service analogies. We believe that ethical pedagogy requires us to patrol the boundaries of roles-our own and those of students. It may mean that we must instruct students in appropriate role relations. Our point is not to encourage professors to be coldly formal, indifferent, or imperiously superior in their relations with students. We do not intend to discourage the lasting relationships that sometimes occur, nor to deny that relationships can be negotiated within a variety of contexts. Our brief is not for affectless formality, but for a sensitive sociological realism. We recognize that a more reserved stance toward students affirms inequality. We are aware that individuals as self-reflexive actors can refuse to behave in ways that support hierarchy. Within meritocratic organizations, however, that endeavor strikes us as quixotic. So long as professors are obliged to rank and evaluate students, to certify their accomplishments, the relationship is inherently unequal. We think it is disingenuous to act otherwise. REFERENCE

Transforming the Sociology of the Family: New Directions for Teaching and Texts

The survey course in the family is one of the most popular sociology offerings. Unfortunately, the content of many of these courses and of most family sociology textbooks does not reflect the reality of the diverse family and household forms in American society, the societal forces that affect families and family members so strongly, the scholarship by social historians that demythologizes the families of the past, and the recent feminist scholarship that shows how life in families is experienced differentially according to gender. In short, many undergraduate students taking the family course are removed from the most scholarly developments in the field, the structural influences on families, the variation in families by class, race, and gender, and even the sociological perspective. This paper examines the current state of family sociology and the problems in teaching this subject, and presents alternatives to the traditional presentations of the family.

Patricia Hill Collins Past and Future Innovations

I am pleased to be part of this symposium to salute the distinguished career of Patricia Hill Collins. Her influence is profoundly important in many sociological specialties. In assessing the impact of her work, I will offer brief retrospective and prospective views of some important developments in feminist sociology. More than any other field, the sociology of gender continues to be widely and deeply influenced by her thought. Nevertheless, not everyone in the present generation of feminist scholars is aware of how different the field was just three decades ago (see Baca Zinn et al. 1986). In today’s swiftly moving currents of feminist scholarship, it is all too easy to take Collins’ early contributions for granted. Yet, the development of the gender field over the past three decades has a great deal to do with the substance and influence of her work. Reflecting on this development casts me back to the period in which her ideas began to take hold and to the social context in which her work shaped my own professional development and that of others in a particular historical moment. My vantage point provides one illustration of the transformative effect of Collins’ Black feminist thought on the sociological incorporation of women of color—Latinas, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. I was a new sociologist in the early 1980s. I was studying inequalities in Mexican American communities, working to counter the limitations of traditional social science with regard to women. By uncovering new information about race and class, I pushed for a reinterpretation of Chicanas’ lives. I did not know it at the time, but my efforts were part of an emerging wave of Latina revisionist scholarship challenging the dominant sociological paradigms on the causes and dynamics of racial ethnic women’s subordination. Our individual research projects were very different, but

The Demographic Transformation and the Sociological Enterprise

The dramatic demographic changes of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States are creating a multiracial, multicultural society. This article examines the intellectual challenges for sociology posed by the emerging racial diversity brought about by these population trends. The problem is that conventional sociological frameworks no longer apply in this increasingly complex social world of rapid population changes, diversity, and polarization. Most significant, conventional American sociology, which has focused on white society rooted in western culture, is challenged by three large racial/ethnic categories. We argue that diversity must be incorporated into our sociologies. This requires two new approaches: (1) Sociology must be recentered, that is, it must move away from the notion that whites have the universal experience against which all others are measured; and (2) Sociologists must apply to diverse populations the same kind of sociological analysis that they apply to mainstream categories. This means that we demythologize by dispelling common myths about those outside the mainstream and that we uncover the mechanisms that construct social differences.

Nurturing Graduate Students: Integrative Scholarship through Textbook Projects.

TEXTBOOKS ARE CONTROVERSIAL in sociology. Some professors refuse to use textbooks in their courses, believing that they are too simplistic. Others view textbooks as effective conduits of sociological knowledge. As an example of this latter position, a recent critique of current family textbooks created a furor in sociology and the national media because of their alleged bias (Glenn 1997; Footnotes 1998). Implicit in Glenns critique was that textbooks impart learning. Further evidence of the importance of textbooks in the learning process is found in the Teaching Sociology special issue devoted to textbooks (1988; see also Agger 1989; and Kendall 1999). The corporatization of textbooks is yet another area of concern. With the increased frequency of mergers among publishing companies, there are not only fewer publishing outlets but also increasing pressures on authors to clone successful books, thereby squelching creativity. An additional controversy involving textbooks is whether they are limited only to transmitting existing knowledge (Tischler 1988). From this position, textbook writing is neither scholarly nor creative. We argue, to the contrary, that textbooks are not limited to the synthesis of existing materials in marketable ways, but that they are capable of actually shaping the