Alice Rossi - Gender and the Life Course

All eighteen papers in this collection were first written for presentation to the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Detroit, Michigan, in September 1983. As President of ASA and Chair of the 1983 Program Committee, it was my privilege to organize the annual meeting and to invite a variety of social scientists to prepare papers for the plenary sessions devoted to the theme: Age and Gender: Gender Differentiation in a Life Span Framework. The Program Committee concurred with my wish to delegate to Organizers of the Thematic Sessions the task of inviting persons of their own choice to write papers for their sessions. Six papers were given at the two Plenary Sessions, and 38 papers at the 12 Thematic Sessions. The pool from which I have chosen the papers in this volume, therefore, consisted of these 44 papers, supplemented by a dozen or so others given at sessions sponsored by the Section on the Sociology of Aging and the Section on Sex and Gender. All the papers that survived the initial screening have been revised, many of them extensively so, for publication in this volume. All appear here in print for the first time, with the exception of my own presidential address, which appeared in the February 1984 issue of the American Sociological Review, and in slightly different form, the paper by Mead Cain, which appeared in the December 1983 issue of Population and Development Review.

Since the Organizers of the Thematic Sessions were the people who invited many of the authors in this volume to give papers in Detroit, it is to many of these Organizers that I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude: Patricia Y. Martin, Carol M. Mueller, Orville G. Brim, Jr., William H. Form, Joan F. Huber, Jean C. Lipman-Blumen, Jessie Bernard, Valerie K. Oppenheimer, Karen O. Mason, and Gary F. Jensen. It is to the good judgment of these ten Organizers that I as editor, and you as reader, are first of all in debt.

Second, I wish to thank all 22 authors of the papers in this volume. They have worked hard, tolerated my detailed feedback and suggestions for revision, and accommodated to a tight time schedule to assure as prompt a publication as possible. It has been a pleasure to work with each and every author in this collection.

Three organizations were also critical in the help they extended to bring this project to completion. The American Sociological Association, and its executive officer, William DAntonio, graciously encouraged the project from its inception, and extended permission to me to seek a publisher willing to produce both a hardcover and softcover edition of the book. Only by so doing, was it possible to keep down the price of a very long softcover edition, and this seemed important to assure a wide circulation of the book. I am also grateful to Aldine Publishing Company, and to Kyle Wallace, Editorial Director of Aldine, for so quickly encouraging the project in its early stages and for doing such a fine job of production. Further, I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues and the staff at the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, for their interest and help in all stages of manuscript preparation. A special thank you to Jeanne Reinle who handled so much of the correspondence and other paper work involved in dealing with 22 authors and 18 papers.

Lastly, my very great thanks to the University of Massachusetts, and to its Graduate Dean, Samuel Conti. It was Dean Contis program of faculty research fellowships that provided me with the leisurely time of such a year-long fellowship to undertake this project and to bring it to a speedy completion.

Alice S. Rossi
Amherst, Massachusetts

When the plans for the 1983 ASA annual meeting were first announced, many people asked why the theme was Age and Gender, rather than Sex and Gender. Knowing of my longstanding interest in sex and gender, they were surprised to note the linkage of gender to age. The rationale for the thematic focus provides a good introduction to this volume. Three considerations led to the thematic focus on gender differentiation in a life span framework. One was to encourage the view that theories on sex and gender are not adequate if they are limited to social, economic, and political constructs. To examine gender in a life span framework encourages an awareness that our theories must embrace biopsychological constructs as well.

The second consideration was to encourage the view that theories of aging are not adequate without a specification of gender. I had been surprised to find that gender often went unnoted in research at the two ends of the human life span: Premature low birthweight babies are rarely identified by sex in biomedical research, despite the fact that the more premature the baby, the higher the probability of maleness, since the sex ratio is approximately 124 at conception but drops to approximately 104 for full-term births. Similarly, research instruments in social gerontology typically inquire about relations with parents, children, and siblings, rather than in gender-specific terms, with mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, etc. Yet we know that across most of the life span from childhood to late middle age, social relations are structured in important ways along gender lines. To neuter premature infants and elderly persons seemed very strange indeed. Hence it was my hope that the dual focus on Age and Gender would alert sociologists to the importance of dealing with both constructs simultaneously.