Category Archives: Sociology

5 NYU Press books named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012

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We are *thrilled* to announce five (yep, count ‘em—FIVE) NYU Press books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.

Honoring “the best of the best” in scholarly publishing, Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles list contains just over 9 percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice during the past year (and less than 3 percent of more than 25,000 titles submitted during this same period). You can find the entire list in the January 2013 issue of Choice.

In celebration, NYU Press is offering 20 percent off each title. Enter promo code CHOICE13 at check out to save on all five award-winners, including The Tender Cut; Planned Obsolescence; Highway under the Hudson; A Troubled Marriage; and The Bully Society. Offer expires February 15, 2013.

Congratulations to our authors, editors, and to everyone who worked on these books!

Announcing our Spring 2013 Catalog…

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NYU Press Spring 2013 Catalog is now online, featuring an exciting range of new books in history, media studies, law, and more!

Highlights include:
TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE: Making the case for a two-party, two-person presidency, this “pipe dream of a book” presents a “novel and provocative thesis worth hearing out” (Kirkus Reviews).

A DEATH AT CROOKED CREEK: Marion Wesson, author of best-selling and prize-winning legal novels including Render up the Body, combines drama and intrigue  with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory in this superbly imagined historical novel.

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: Charlene Mires tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in an extraordinary race to host the U.N. headquarters at a pivotal moment in history.

(You can also click here to access this catalog via our website, or find our catalogs available on Edelweiss.)

The not-so-simple ‘Decline of Evangelical America’

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—Justin Wilford

A week after the 2012 national and state elections, I noted how downcast many evangelical leaders were about the election results. There was a widespread sense that evangelicals were facing “a new moral landscape,” one in which they were marginal figures. No doubt, for many institutional leaders in American evangelicalism, this is worrisome news. If it is “the end of evangelical dominance in politics,” as one evangelical writer put it, then this cannot bode well for what really matters for these leaders: putting people in the pews.

This past weekend, James S. Dickerson, an evangelical pastor writing in the New York Times’s Sunday Review, argued that although “it hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals” and things look to be trending downward, there is hope still for this embattled form of Christianity.

Dickerson argues that the American evangelicalism can right itself if it embraces its new marginalized status, acting less with the “superior hostility” of a bullying, dominant cultural group, and more with the “grace and humility” of outsiders in a strange land.

This may be good advice in any case; who among us couldn’t do with a little more grace and humility? But it also happens to be the only card left to play for conservative Protestantism. As I show in Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism, many of the largest and fastest growing churches in America—like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church—foreground everyday secular problems of work-life and family, modulate hot-button cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and downplay theological differences between denominations. And yet, these churches hold the same conservative theological views as the churches of older generations. The difference is in presentation, not in the core doctrines held by the church leaders.

This might appear as the purely cynical marketing strategy of a failing brand. Even Dickerson’s excellent presentation of the matter leaves room for such an interpretation (he implores evangelicals to hold on to their “unpopular doctrines” while “re-emphasizing” the less off-putting message of God’s saving grace). But I don’t think the matter is so simple.

First, these hardline doctrines have served as important boundary markers, clearly delineating the sacred in-group from the secular out-group. Now that many evangelicals like Dickerson and Rick Warren are concerned that these very boundary markers are keeping people away, even relegating these issues to secondary importance is a major shift for evangelicalism. It means that the most defining issues of conservative Protestantism, chiefly biblical literalism, could be up for debate as leaders begin to grapple with an increasingly eclectic membership body with few historical ties to evangelicalism who have been drawn in by the “good news” but turned off by the increasingly unpopular cultural doctrines.

Second, the structure of these new churches is built around blurring the distinctions between the sacred and secular. Their buildings are designed to blend into the secular landscape; the weekend sermons are focused on success at work, marriage difficulties, underachieving children, and even fitness and diet; and the most important gatherings in the church occur during the week, in small groups in members’ homes. This is not about drawing boundaries between a (spiritually and doctrinally) pure church and secular world, but rather about tearing down these boundaries to make the church more meaningful in the context of the world. Unfortunately for hardliners, this means that many of the aforementioned “unpopular doctrines” become issues pushed off for another day that never comes.

Finally, Dickerson’s piece and the examples he gives of churches like Warren’s Saddleback are tacit acknowledgments of something that many social researchers’ of religion have been resisting for several years: old-school secularization. When he writes of a “shrinking minority [of evangelicals] in the United States” and a generational crisis in which the young are not replacing the old, he’s describing what has become fashionable to refer to as the “European exceptionalism” of secularization. It appears now that Europe is not so exceptional after all.

What is, however, exceptional about American evangelicalism, and pastors like Dickerson and Warren, is their willingness to innovate, blur old distinctions, and adapt to the culture they are in, rather than fight it. To my eyes, this means that secularization is not a fate, but a situation that can be responded to in a multitude of ways.

Justin Wilford is author of Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism (NYU Press, 2012).

Holiday gift-giving and the gender trap

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—Emily W. Kane

A recent news piece on gender and toys caught my eye at a time when many of us are buying holiday gifts for the children in our lives. It’s the story of a 13-year-old girl from New Jersey who started a petition to encourage Hasbro to make Easy-Bake Ovens in more gender-neutral colors and feature both boys and girls on the packaging.

It resonates with media attention focused on new lines of Legos and Mega Bloks targeted toward girls, and their contrast with lines targeted toward boys. These stories confirm what many shoppers notice and what scholars have documented more systematically: the production and marketing of children’s toys remains highly differentiated by gender.

In The Gender Trap, I report on interviews with mothers and fathers of preschool aged children, and find that while some consider gender-typing in children’s toys neutral or positive, others work hard to resist it. But even those who make that effort often give in to what feels inevitable, as gifts flow in from relatives and their children beg for whatever their peers have. Whether enthusiastic or reluctant, this tendency to surround our children with highly gendered toys has the potential to cultivate different capacities in boys and girls that reinforce gender inequalities in adulthood (see, for example, my November 2012 blog post on the childhood foundations of the gendered wage gap). Particularly tricky in this regard is the double standard that makes it easier to find toys that allow girls to wander into traditionally masculine territory than the reverse.

And that brings me back to the Easy-Bake Oven petition, which led to a meeting this week between the petitioner and Hasbro executives. As I discuss at much greater length in my book, all gender-typing in children’s toys and activities leads us into a series of traps, but it’s especially important to avoid focusing only on new opportunities for girls. Without corresponding attempts to widen boys’ opportunities, girls may grow up to find themselves facing a series of obstacles like occupational sex segregation, the wage gap, the feminization of poverty, and unequal divisions of household labor among those living in heterosexual partnerships. And boys will continue to find their options and experiences constrained in deeply troubling ways, as typical definitions of childhood masculinity leave only limited room for nurturance, emotional expression, cooperation, and a variety of aesthetic pleasures to be cultivated.

So if you head out to finish any holiday shopping soon, consider looking for something that might appeal to any child of a given age, rather than something highly gender-typed. And consider checking out that Easy-Bake Oven petition, too. As I note in the conclusion to my book, “Not only parents, but everyone—whether we have young children or not, whether we have ever parented or not—can contribute… Gendered childhoods are not fixed in nature or inevitable in society. With concerted effort, we can reduce the force of the gender trap and open up the possibility of a better, less constrained, and more equitable world for our children and for ourselves.”

Emily W. Kane is Professor of Sociology at Bates College, and author of The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls (NYU Press, 2012).

[Ed. note: Following 13-year-old McKenna Pope's petition that garnered over 44,000 signatures, Hasbro has agreed to introduce a gender-neutral version of its Easy-Bake Oven in 2013. Win!]

Sandy Hook: Another symptom of widespread cultural despair

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—Jessie Klein

I’m still shaken from last Friday’s shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, one of the worst massacres in the history of the United States.

Not much information is available about the 20-year-old gunman or his motives. We know that he had been a student in the Newtown school system years before, and those who were acquainted with him described him as “brilliant” but “remote.” We need to stop looking for the profile of the perpetrators; and examine instead the profile of schools and society more generally. Many school shooters since 1979 have been described with those same adjectives.

When gunmen are repeatedly described as “remote” or as a “loner,” there is likely more than just a “personality disorder” behind their history. In 2004, the General Social Survey (GSS) revealed that fifty percent of our population has either one person or no one to talk to about important issues in their lives. Scholars suggest that this qualifies as inadequate or “marginal support.”

We need to stop looking for perpetrator’s profiles, and instead examine the profile of schools and society overall. According to GSS data from 1985 to 2004, social isolation has tripled. Other reports suggest that empathy has significantly decreased whereas depression and anxiety rates, among adults and youth alike, are soaring. Panic attacks have become part of the common vernacular and are no longer stigmatized as a characteristic of the insane. With fewer options for social acceptance, it is perhaps no surprise then, that depression among youth is starting at increasingly younger ages.

In The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools, I discuss how bullying and other hurtful behaviors have also become common norms. These days, we are pressured to become as successful and powerful as we can be, but are rarely encouraged to check on our neighbors or offer support to others in need. We are working so hard and are so overscheduled that we barely have time to stop for one another, even if it were our priority.

Schools need to make social obligation and support for one another a top goal in curricula, as well as a value discussed and re-affirmed in every aspect of their community. We need a new generation of youth to lead our country who will feel that being compassionate and empathic is just as important as being successful. We need to find a time again when talking to neighbors and offering support is considered kinder than leaving them alone because they are probably busy.

Of course there would be fewer fatalities if we had better gun control laws. There is no question about that. But then the symptoms of our despairing culture will be revealed in other forms. In addition to gun control, we need to tackle the real issues. People need to authentically connect with one another and support each other as a matter of course. We need to transform our bully society into more compassionate and integrated communities. Only then can we truly change.

Jessie Klein is Assistant Professor of Sociology/Criminal Justice at Adelphi University and author of Bully Society (NYU Press, 2012). She has also served as a supervisor, school social worker, college adviser, social studies teacher, substance abuse prevention counselor and conflict resolution coordinator at many high schools. Her writing appears in scholarly journals as well as popular media.

New Spreadable Media essays: Week 3

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We’re at week three since launching the online component of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture!

Here are this week’s round of web exclusive essays written by selected contributors who have shaped the argument put forth in Spreadable Media:

  • “The Value of Retrogames“—Bob Rehak, a film and media studies professor at Swarthmore College, examines how grassroots interest in residual media and culture may coalesce online, sparking new kinds of cultural practices and production.
  • Clothing has passed between different kinds of exchanges for centuries, acquiring different meanings and values in the process—and, in “A Global History of Secondhand Clothing,” filmmaker and MIT media historian Hanna Rose Shell traces and examines those shifting sartorial roles.
  • In “Retrobrands and Retromarketing,” York University professor Robert V. Kozinets discusses the strategies through which companies engage in “retrobranding,” reviving or relaunching brands from the past in ways that capitalize on existing fandoms and provide launching points for the creation of new markets.

Check ‘em out, and stay tuned at http://spreadablemedia.org/essays—where each week leading up to the book’s publication (in January 2013!), a new batch of exclusive essays will be released.

(And hey! Feel free to debate/critique/trash each piece in the comments section. Expand the conversation, transform the ideas. That’s how spreadable media works.)

Price of the “gender trap”? Childhood foundations of the wage gap

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—Emily W. Kane

Last month, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released its most recent study of the gender wage gap, “Graduating to a Pay Gap.” According to the data compiled by the AAUW, just one year out of college, women who were working full time earned, on average, only 82% of what their male counterparts earned. Media attention has focused on AAUW’s finding that, even after accounting for the impact of different college majors, occupations and industries, about one third of the wage gap remains unexplained.

The gap that remains after accounting for college majors and occupations is an important one, but it shouldn’t distract us from the even greater proportion of the gender wage gap that is explained by what social scientists call “occupational gender segregation,” or the tendency for men and women to pursue different courses of study in college and different occupations regardless of their level of formal education. Nor should it distract us from the financial price women pay for their lower overall hours in the labor force, which are often driven by domestic responsibilities. As I argue in my recent book The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls, some of the first foundations for all of this are laid down in early childhood.

Drawing on interviews I conducted with mothers and fathers of preschoolers from a wide range of backgrounds, my analysis reveals how parents can unwittingly contribute to reproducing occupational gender segregation, the wage gap, and women’s responsibilities for domestic labor. From toys and activities that encourage nurturance in girls and technical problem-solving in boys to the differential way they frame the importance of juggling work and family for sons and daughters, even parents anxious to open new opportunities for their daughters often reinforce patterns that are likely to trap them instead. One mother, for example, reported that she had discouraged her four-year old son’s expressed interest in growing up to be a daycare worker “because he could never support a family doing that.”

Another parent, this one a father, noted that he hopes his five-year old daughter has the option to pursue a high-powered career “in the boardroom”, but also hopes she could say “I am a woman and I want to stay home with my kids.” These kinds of comments were echoed often throughout my study, and were rarely combined with parallel comments about a girl’s potential responsibility for supporting children financially or a boy’s option to stay at home with kids. In small moments like these, parents reinforced occupational segregation, assumptions about men’s responsibilities for earning a “family wage” (and thus about women’s financial dependence on men), and routine acceptance of the double standard of low pay associated with traditionally female occupations like child care, social work and primary education.

As I outline in much greater detail in the book, all of those factors combine to reinforce gender traps that most parents hoped to avoid. But I also argue that with greater recognition of the constraints faced by both men and women as they struggle to support families, and greater awareness of the childhood lessons both girls and boys need to learn to be prepared for those future constraints, parents, educators and all of us interested in a better world for our children can sidestep some of the gender traps that contribute to the pay gap the AAUW report points out, a pay gap that only increases in the years after college graduation, and that is all the more complicated for women without college degrees and women who face other intersecting wage disparities by race or citizenship status.

Emily W. Kane is Professor of Sociology at Bates College, and author of The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls (NYU Press, August 2012).

Presidential debate’s real winner?
The NRA

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—Scott Melzer

President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney were asked to share their gun control views at Tuesday night’s town hall debate. Who won this one? The National Rifle Association.

In 1994, President Clinton tangled with the NRA and gun rights supporters prior to signing a federal assault weapons ban, but it expired ten years later. A questioner at last night’s debate asked President Obama what he has done or will do to “limit the availability of assault weapons” and keep them out of the hands of criminals.

By any objective measure, President Obama has not been a champion of gun control. He responded, “You know, we’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment. And I believe in the Second Amendment. You know, we’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves.” The statement could have just as easily been uttered by his Republican opponent.

Eventually, the president expressed tepid support for reenacting the assault weapons ban, but only as a part of a broader community and school-based approach to stopping kids from using violence. Obama’s lack of a gun control agenda confirms his lack of desire—or perhaps more likely his disinclination—to pressure Congress to pass gun control legislation. With no robust gun control movement to force politicians to fight for gun control, not even multiple mass killings this past summer could generate much of a conversation about gun control, let alone action. The NRA and gun rights activists have won the debate. This has not stopped them, though, from painting Obama as an extremist seeking to take away gun rights.

“Today, we live in an America that is getting harder to recognize every day led by a President who mocks our values, belittles our faith, and is threatened by our freedom,” said NRA Political Victory Fund chairman Chris W. Cox at the NRA’s formal announcement endorsing the Romney-Ryan ticket. NRA top officer Wayne LaPierre added, “In this election, there is no debate. There is only one choice, only one hope, to save our firearms freedom and our way of life,” he argued. “On November 6, vote freedom first – Vote Romney-Ryan!”

The NRA claims its defense of gun rights is a defense of all rights and freedoms. The Second Amendment protects all others, they say. The NRA frames President Obama (and the Democratic Party) as proponents of big-government policies, and thus enemies of freedom.

The NRA’s gun rights rhetoric doesn’t align with reality.

Perhaps the president is being a political animal by avoiding expressing strong support for gun control. He does so because it is beneficial, and it benefits him because the NRA and gun rights activists have created the new reality. Publicly supporting gun control (or worse) introducing gun control legislation comes at a cost.

As the candidate for an unquestionably anti-gun control party, Governor Romney should be able to exploit this topic for gain. Instead, he agreed with the president that enforcement of current laws and community-based solutions should be used to reduce violence. Romney is trapped not by his political opponents but by his own shifting position on the issue.

Contradicting his earlier position as Governor of Massachusetts, last night he expressed opposition to any new gun control laws, including a ban on assault weapons. The president accused Romney of flip-flopping, but did not paint his opponent as a far-right pro-gun extremist. This is an exception to the president’s strategy of portraying Romney as “severely conservative,” to use the governor’s own words. Severely conservative gun rights supporters suffer no political consequences. Quite the opposite, they receive the grassroots and deep pockets support of the NRA and its four million members.

The NRA and its base of deeply committed gun rights activists have shifted the debate, so that Democratic presidential candidates repeat NRA lines about Second Amendment rights and Republican presidential candidates (even those who previously supported assault weapons bans) cannot secure the party’s nomination unless they oppose all forms of gun control.

The NRA won Tuesday night’s debate because it has won the broader debate about gun control and gun rights. And as long as it continues to wield its formidable power and influence in the name of firearms freedom, the NRA will win again and again.

Scott Melzer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Albion College and author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (new in paperback).

For our First Black President, no more racial niceties

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—Enid Logan

Social scientists have spent a great deal of time in recent years writing about covert racism, also known as colorblind racism, have-a-nice-day racism, or racism lite. Many of us have believed ourselves to have entered into a new racial era wherein overt racist sentiments are rarely uttered aloud, and in which the mechanisms that sustain white supremacy, though insidious and impactful, are now much more subtle and hard to pin down. But then Barack Obama ran for, and won, the presidency and Overt Racism once again reared its ugly head.

At this juncture, I believe, many scholars and non-scholars alike are trying to figure out just what is going on. How is it that in the era of racial niceties, where racial meaning is most often conveyed through “sanitized” and deracialized discourse, old style racism, overt racism, or “Archie Bunker” racism has suddenly moved from the fringes to the conservative mainstream? How is it that a moment that was supposed to represent the nation’s triumph over racism has seemingly lead to the opposite?

In the last several years, we have seen the vilest of racial imagery applied to the President, his young daughters, and his wife. Particularly visible early on was the signage at the rallies of the so-called “Tea Party” in 2009-2010. President Obama was figured variously as an African witch doctor, as Hitler, or as a white-faced Joker, with black circles around his eyes and bloody red lips. Comments about the Obamas left on the internet over the past several years have been especially vicious. And, in November 2009, it was revealed that the top ranked Google search image for Michelle Obama was a Photoshopped rendering of her as an ape. As sociologists Adia Harvey Wingfield and Joe Feagin report, in July 2009, one anonymous reader at the Free Republic—an online message board for independent, grass-roots conservatism—described 11-year old Malia Obama “as ‘a common street whore’…and went on to “wonder when she will get her first abortion.” And in March of this year, a federal judge circulated an email in which it was implied that Barack Obama had been conceived at a party during which his mother had had sex with both a black man and a dog.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Obama has faced lashes of anger and incivility directed at him from white elected officials. Consider Congressman Joe Wilson who yelled “You lie!” at Obama from the Senate floor, and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who greeted the President with a finger in the face as he arrived at a Phoenix airport. Once considered primarily to be an extremist, fringe political movement, the Tea Party itself has achieved sweeping electoral success, as a number of its candidates were elected to the U.S. Congress during the 2010 midterm elections, largely on the grounds of their fierce opposition to the President.

During his brief, fake bid for the Republican presidential nomination, business tycoon Donald Trump based his entire political platform on the clearly race-baiting ideology of “birtherism.” This is the view that Obama’s presidency is illegitimate, because his birth certificate is a fake, and that he is not a U.S. citizen. While this belief would seem to be a highly illogical and irrational one, an August 2010 poll found that 41% of Republicans and 1 in 4 Americans overall believed that the president was probably lying about his citizenship.

But perhaps the most ominous development we have seen in recent years lies in the area of voter policy. Legislatures in 41 states have introduced restrictive voter identification laws in the last year, designed expressly to limit the access to vote. Voting rights would particularly be curtailed among the young, the elderly, and non-whites—all liberal-leaning constituencies that are likely to vote for President Obama in 2012. Critics have likened these measures to the poll taxes and literacy tests that restricted African American access to the vote for seven and a half decades after the Reconstruction.

So what has happened? Was Overt Racism always already in the background, ready to reemerge at any moment, and had we just been fooling ourselves to think that it would stay there? Is this a calculated political strategy on the part of the Right, designed to inflame racial fears and drive whites to the polls on election day? Or does it represent the uncoordinated, inchoate rage of a segment of the white population that perceives itself to be imperiled by the impending “non-white” demographic takeover of the U.S.?

I believe it to be a mixture of the two. The reaction demonstrates that for all the claims that Obama is a milquetoast moderate who has brought about very little change and done almost nothing to shake up the status quo, not everyone is in agreement. The reappearance of Overt Racism in the Age of Obama tells us that white racial anxiety and anti-black hostility in the U.S., as well as an abiding investment in the U.S. as a white nation, run much, much deeper than many of us had imagined.

Obama’s victory seemed at first to portend great things for the U.S. As I have written in my recent book, from 2006 to 2008, a chorus of pundits proclaimed that Barack Obama offered redemption, absolution, and renewal to the nation, all of which was refracted through the magic of his blackness. Above all, we were told, the election of a black man as president would prove that whites had largely gotten over the issue of race, and Real Racism was now firmly in our past.  But this has been proven to be manifestly false. And let’s be clear. It was John McCain who won the majority of the white vote (56%) in 2008, and without the high turnout of the black, Latino and Asian electorate, he would have won the presidency.

Obama’s election was without a doubt a triumphal and defining moment in our nation’s history. But it was a moment that awoke the dormant T-Rex of Race, igniting a special kind of fear and loathing in the nation, aimed directly at our First Black President. If Obama wins the election in 2012, it will be despite the power of racial fears to sway some whites towards the GOP ticket. It will also be because the expanding multiracial electorate turns out for Obama in large numbers, thus helping continue our march towards an America that is red, white, blue, and brown.

Enid Logan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her book, “At this Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race was published by NYU Press in 2011.

Praying the gay away

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Hot off the presses.

Last week, California banned the use of sexuality-conversion therapy, and became the first state in the country to do so. Although the decision was heralded as a milestone in gay rights activism, many also warned that it was simply a first step in the right direction. After all, as we learned through Bernadette Barton’s newly released Pray the Gay Away, the practice of, well, praying the gay away is no stranger in Bible Belt states, where Christian beliefs trump all, and gay rights often lag behind. Here, Bernadette tells us why it’s important to embrace equal rights for all—and why we’ll all benefit from doing so.

For more from this interview, head on over to our YouTube page.

Chinese growth and happiness

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—Peter N. Stearns

Recent surveys on Chinese life satisfaction provide yet another indication of the fraught relationship between modern development and overall happiness. The New York Times report by Richard Easterlin—always one of our most interesting social scientists—shows pretty clearly that stupendous growth in the overall economy and in consumption standards over the past two decades has not only not generated corresponding increases in reported satisfaction, but has actually accompanied a decline. Results plummeted as growth accelerated in the 1990s, then picked up a bit in the past few years but without recovering 1990 levels.

Happiness is a tricky thing to measure, of course, and it’s interesting that the Easterlin terminology alternates between happiness and life satisfaction, which are not necessarily exactly the same things. Comparative studies suggest that happiness is a tricky concept in East Asian cultures (in contrast to the West and Latin America), but this would not per se distort findings over time within the same culture.

It’s certainly nice to see a discussion of Chinese issues free from our common impulse to bash or gloat. This is a nervous time for mutual U.S. and Chinese perceptions, and we often distort problems in an effort to feel better—happier?—about China’s impressive surge. (Here’s a scary thought: How much has American happiness come to depend on claims we’re better than others, regardless of data?)

But the Easterlin findings do suggest a couple of further thoughts about happiness and modernity:

First, the findings are absolutely unsurprising in any historical perspective. China is still in relatively early phases of industrial maturation. I don’t think there is any record of any society in a similar phase in which happiness does not decline. Of course we lack the polling data for the past that we now enjoy, so my assertion can’t be fully proved. But the major source of outright decline in China rests among the bottom third of the population, faced with massive change including introduction to factory work conditions and encounters with urban life even as attachments to the countryside remain strong. This sounds eerily familiar to historians who have worked on Britain’s—or Germany’s, or Japan’s—industrial surge—or even the United States’s in its period of massive industrial immigration. This doesn’t detract from the Easterlin findings, or prevent us from hoping that the Chinese will more quickly figure out how to do things better. But it does remind us—regardless of our views on the benefits and drawbacks of more fully achieved modern economies—that modernization has always come with a price.

Which means that, in evaluating modernity more generally, the more interesting Easterlin finding may be the only moderate improvement in satisfaction among the upper third of the Chinese population. These folks are not facing the worst strains of the process. They are by definition more prosperous, and often more accustomed to urban conditions. Yet even they are not jumping with joy.

Easterlin concludes that the Chinese data point to the important of beefing up the safety net, to provide fuller protections for the poorer classes: more job security, better health care, more help for children and the elderly. And he uses his findings to warn Americans about tolerating too much further deterioration in our own nets. I don’t disagree, and would only add a plea for attention to environmental safety nets as well.

But there is probably more than safety nets involved, which is where the upper third comes in—and where we can also draw some lessons for ourselves. We know that, reflected in the Chinese case, a first turn to consumerism increases happiness but that the surge is often moderate and that it’s always finite: further improvements don’t help. China may be facing not only safety net issues but also broader concerns about finding value and meaning in modern life. And here, though there may be more specifically Chinese factors involved, they clearly join the modern throng.

For although modernized societies tend to be happier than nonmodern, the gap is variable and not, on the whole, as great as might be expected given standard of living gains. Here is where, along with safety net repair, Chinese and American observers unquestionably find common ground. We all need to be thinking about improving our management of modern success at both social and personal levels. We need to seize opportunities to share insights and learn from mutual experience. More and more of us, obviously, are in the modern boat together, and we can probably figure out how to steer it better.

Peter N. Stearns is Provost and University Professor at George Mason University. He is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Social History, and author of Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society (NYU Press, 2012).

Wanting a soulmate? Gendered anticipation and the gender trap

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—Emily W. Kane

A recent Slate article by Jasmeet Sidhu, provocatively titled “How to Buy a Daughter,” explores the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (or PGD) for the purposes of guaranteeing that a pregnancy results in a son or daughter. As Sidhu notes, “the average cost of a gender selection procedure at high-profile clinics is about $18,000, and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures are performed every year. Fertility doctors foresee an explosion in sex-selection procedures on the horizon, as couples become accustomed to the idea that they can pay to beget children of the gender they prefer.” So many things are striking about this phenomenon, including the way class and gender intersect in who has access to the resources to gain this kind of control over the gender of their eventual children. Through the social resource of money, affluent parents can control the apparently natural process of determining the sex of a baby.

But there’s another connection between social factors and what is apparently natural, one lurking at the root of the very assumption that one’s children will be dramatically different people depending on whether those two chromosomes are XX or XY, and it’s a connection I address in my new book, The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls.

I interviewed a wide range of parents of preschoolers—they included mothers and fathers, some gay and some straight. Among the interviewees were biological parents as well as adoptive, foster and step parents, partnered parents as well as single parents, and parents from a variety of racial and class backgrounds. I began each interview with a simple question: Before you ever had children, did you have any preference for eventually having a son or a daughter? Most did recall a preference one way or the other, and as I put it in my book, “At this early stage, on the relatively frictionless plane of imagination, parents from all backgrounds expressed a strikingly consistent narrative of traditionally gendered offspring.” As I go on to note,

“They recounted envisioning iconic scenes of mothers shopping and talking with daughters and fathers playing catch and watching football with sons. They spoke about sons carrying on the family name and protecting female siblings, and daughters staying close emotionally long after childhood. These parents assumed that their children’s interests and tendencies would be determined by whether they were male or female, indicating that they anticipated a highly gendered child. For parents who ended up having a child whose gender they preferred, these anticipations are potentially self-fulfilling prophecies, as they began constructing their child’s gender even before the child was born. Even those who did not have a child with the preferred gender may well have laid the foundation for assumptions about what their eventual child would not enjoy, given their gendered assumptions about the preferred child.”

I refer to this process as gendered anticipation, and one of the many examples I offer comes from a mother who indicated that she wanted a daughter because she “wanted a soul mate, someone who would grow up with me over the years and do things with me.” I argue that in the process of anticipating that a daughter would be a soul mate or that a son would enjoy playing sports, these parents are socially constructing the outcomes many will later read back as naturally issuing forth from their child’s chromosomes. As they draw on socially enforced images, there is clearly potential for this gendered anticipation to become a trap that parents may not even realize they are falling into, a trap that awaits their anticipated children as well. And this trap casts its net beyond their individual children and households. In what they assume about boys and girls, and about mothers and fathers, parents reinforce positive judgments about those who perform gender conventionally and reinforce obstacles for those who do not. Without any intention of doing so, these parents contribute to the social gender norms that later shape their own and their children’s behavior.

Loosening these kinds of expectations, beginning with pre-parenthood gendered anticipation, has the potential to dismantle other elements of the gender trap, and help create a better world for children and a more equitable world for adults as well.

Emily W. Kane is Professor of Sociology at Bates College, and author of the recently released, The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls.