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This chapter describes and analyzes the literature on gender in the military. Of special interest from a macrosociological perspective are historical and current trends in women's participation in the armed forces of the U.S. and other nations and the factors that affect them. The central role of gender in the military--and the role of the military in defining gender in the larger society--have implications for men's behaviors and for men's and women's views regarding policies on women's military roles and on homosexuality in the armed forces. The construction of gender in military family issues is also discussed.

This chapter discusses the link between sex, race and ethnic inequality in the U.S. workplace. Workplace inequality by sex, race and ethnicity is linked to inequality in all social institutions because people's jobs distribute so many social and economic rewards. Jobs are mechanisms that govern workers' access to earnings, authority, status and mobility opportunities as well as their exposure to pleasant or unpleasant working conditions. Job segregation is a key mechanism in workplace inequality.

Gender is a system of social practices within society that constitutes people as different in socially significant ways and organizes relations of inequality on the basis of the difference. Like other systems of difference and inequality, such as race or class, gender involves widely shared cultural beliefs and institutions at the macro-level of analysis, behaviors and expectations at the interactional level, and self-conceptions and attitudes at the individual level of analysis. Although each component is important, events at the interactional level may be especially important for the maintenance or change of the gender system. Compared to people on opposite sides of class and racial divides, men and women in the United States interact with one another frequently, often on familiar, even intimate terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter attempts to analyze some of the revolutionary changes in pervasive gendered identities of both social persons at the center of social roles and of members of their social circles that provide resources and rights, and receive these from the person. The author begins by presenting and stressing her definition of social role. Next, she analyzes gendered roles, mainly in the complex of U.S. society, using the definition of social role and related concepts. She then discusses racial, ethnic, religious and social class variations that exist in the roles of wife and husband, mother and father and are complicated by the intertwining of these aspects and by change over time.

This chapter seeks to emphasize the role of social movements in gender change by examining the diverse, multiple and often contradictory social movement activities organized around gender in the U.S. Specifically, the authors focus on the various and sometimes paradoxical ideologies and organizational structures of the modern women's movement. They then trace the larger macrostructural preconditions that underlie the emergence of feminist movements in most Western societies. After a brief examination of feminist mobilization in an international context, they turn to examine the continuity and transformation of the contemporary feminist movement in the U.S. and the multiple and shifting strategies collective actors have used in the struggle for equality between women and men.

This chapter examines the trends in men's and women's absolute and relative poverty rates in the U.S. between 1950 and 1996. The authors discuss and assess three explanations for the feminization of poverty, including Diana Pearce's claims that the meager welfare benefits led to the feminization of poverty. Sara McLanahan's argument that changing family structures were the principal culprit, and England's assertion that gains in women's earnings are beginning to close the gap. They end by reviewing cross-national evidence of the feminization of poverty. These comparisons show how family structure, earnings and government transfer programs have allowed some countries to avoid the feminization of poverty.