Naomi Gerstel

Kin Support among Blacks and Whites: Race and Family Organization

This article addresses two central debates in the scholarship on black families: the disorganization versus superorganization debate and the culture versus structure debate. Focusing on kin support as a measure of family integration and using the National Survey of Families and Households (1992-1994), this article challenges the assumptions about black and white families in both debates. It shows that blacks and whites have different patterns of kin support involvement. Whereas blacks are more involved in practical support (help with transportation, household work, and child care), whites report greater involvement in financial and emotional kin support. This article also shows that gender is crucial for understanding racial differences. Black men and white men are very much alike, whereas there are many significant differences between black women and white women. Furthermore, in understanding kin support, diversity within racial groups appears to matter more than race itself. Social structure explains most of the racial differences in kin support, though cultural differences between whites and blacks do exist and help to explain kin support.

Fathering, Class, and Gender A Comparison of Physicians and Emergency Medical Technicians

Using a multimethod approach (including a survey, interviews, and observations), this article examines the link between class and masculinities by comparing the way two groups—professional men (physicians) and working-class men (emergency medical technicians, or EMTs)—practice fatherhood. First, the authors show that these two groups practice different types of masculinity as they engage in different kinds of fatherhood. Physicians emphasize “public fatherhood,” which entails attendance at public events but little involvement in the daily care of their children. In contrast, EMTs are not only involved in their childrens public events but also emphasize “private fatherhood,” which entails involvement in their daily care. Second, the authors suggest that these differing types of involvement can be explained by the contrasting employment conditions of each group as well the gender order of their families, especially the divergent labor market positions of spouses and the division of parenting. The authors conclude by arguing that these working-class fathers are “undoing gender” while professional fathers reproduce the conventional gender order.

Marital dissolution and health: Do males or females have greater risk?☆

Although research shows that marriage protects health, some argue that it protects men more than women. The paper explores this argument by examining the special case of the separated and divorced. If men benefit from marriage, then they should have greater health risk when marriage ends. Examining data on morbidity, mortality and mental health, we use ratio analysis to compare males and females. The findings do not provide consistent support for the prediction that marital dissolution has a greater effect on men than on women. Rather, it is type of health problem, severity and stage of greatest risk that varies by gender. Men have more of the severe health problems including mortality and hospitalization of all types. Women have more of the less severe health and mental health problems. Men and women differ in whether separation or divorce is associated with greater risk. We speculate about gender-linked experiences to explain these differences.

Job Leaves and the Limits of the Family and Medical Leave Act: The Effects of Gender, Race and Family

This article examines the need for and use of leaves designated by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Using national data, we show that women, parents, those with little income, and African Americans are particularly likely to perceive a need for job leaves. However, it is married—not single—women and Whites who are particularly likely to take such leaves. The authors suggest that this disjunction between need and use is a consequence of the construction of leave policy—that it provides for only short, unpaid leaves for a narrow slice of workers and those politically constructed as “family”—and the unresponsiveness of workplaces. These limits likely reinforce inequality based on gender, race, and family status.

A Labor of Love or Labor Itself: Care Work among Adult Brothers and Sisters

Although many have examined care work within families, few have assessed caregiving among adult brothers and sisters. Based on original data, this article lends a multifaceted view of sibling care work by examining the amount and kind of help adults provide to all siblings in their family and the manner in which the social characteristics of sibling care providers, recipients, their shared relationship, and the family of origin shapes caregiving. The authors found that the vast majority of adults provide a wide range of care to their siblings on a yearly, even monthly basis. Gender, age, and social class shape sibling help, whereas race exerts little effect. Unmarried parents receive significantly less help than do their married and childless counterparts. Finally, sibling care work depends on family context: Having a living parent facilitates caregiving among siblings, whereas greater family size forces adults to act judiciously about what and to whom they give.

The Third Shift: Gender and Care Work Outside the Home

Caregiving remains womens work far more than mens. Although women and men often attribute this difference to “nature,” this paper argues for the importance of structure, especially in employment. At least to some extent, womens employment—especially in jobs similar to mens—reduces the care work they do for kin, if not for friends. Examining the different amount and meanings that women and men—like Euro-Americans and African Americans—ascribe to care work, I suggest we view such care work as a survival strategy as well as a demanding labor of love. In this context, recent social policies should be seen as not only privatizing care but also producing growing inequality as well as a vacuum of care.

Divorce and Stigma

In this paper, I analyze the stigma associated with divorce. Drawing on interviews with 104 divorced women and men, I show how stigma attaches to the conditions surrounding divorce rather than to divorce as a general category. Various processes—including the splitting of friends and the development of accounts—lead at least one party to a divorce to feel blameworthy. Individuals who divorce see themselves as excluded from and devalued in informal social life. Finally, I suggest that the divorced participate in stigmatizing divorce: they themselves devalue others who are divorced and sustain the idea that to be married is to be “normal.” If we understand stigma as referring not simply to the realm of public sanctions but rather see it as emerging out of everyday experience, it is clear that the divorced continue to be stigmatized.

Marriage: The Good, the Bad, and the Greedy

Even good marriages can have some bad side effects, taking people away from other social connections.

DIVORCE, GENDER, AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION

Based on interviews with 104 women and men, this article argues that marriage constrains while divorce liberates men and women to develop relationships, but they do so in different ways with different consequences for each. The separated and divorced women were better than the men or themselves while married at building and maintaining old, and intimate, relationships. In this sense, separation and divorce proved generous; marriage, greedy. However, because of the structure of their lives and the opportunities available to them, separated and divorced women were not so good at developing new and casual ties. It was the structure of the mens lives that provided access to “instant networks.” Developed to alleviate loneliness, these groups provided a place in the wider community that men did not seek while married.

The Therapeutic Incarceration of Homeless Families

We discovered from a sample of 340 homeless families that services designed to aid them emerged from two, often conflicting, scrambles for resources. Social service providers parlayed public sentiment toward homelessness into service-intensive programs. The homeless took advantage of such programs, not necessarily for the services, but as a way to more quickly get subsidized housing. The result was an unintentional conflict of interest and failed policy. The homeless remained in the program longer than assumed because of a shortage of subsidized housing and because the regimented services ultimately undermined what fragile social networks they had previously devised to survive.