JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.Studies increasingly suggest that the personal relations of men and women differ. In this note we present data which show that differences between the friendships of men and of women are conditional upon stage in the life cycle, and we argue that this interaction effect is evidence for both a structural and dispositional explanation of behavioral differences between the sexes. Explaining Gender and Social RelationsThere are essentially two approaches to the study of how men's and women's social relations differ: dispositional and structural. Dispositional approaches explain gender differences in social relations by ongoing inclinations which originate in biology, culture, or early or adult socialization. Structural approaches explain gender differences by the different positions women and men typically occupy in the social system, and their differing access to economic, political, and ideological resources of power and privilege. Purely structural explanations explain behavioral differences by the direct, uninternalized effects of social structure. Dispositional explanations have been the most frequent approach to gender contrasts in social relations.We propose that gender differences in friendships emerge most sharply in particular periods of the life course, periods which offer very *This paper is a report of the Northern California Community Study, sponsored by the Center for Studies of Metropolitan Problems, N.I.M.H.Friendship, Gende; Life Cycle / 133 1,921 nonkin friends in the analysis, all men's friends were more likely to come from work than all women's, 25 and 14 percent, respectively, and far less likely to have been met through the spouse, 3 in contrast to 20 percent.) These differences narrow in the later stages, but in those stages relatively few wives worked. 9. The dependent variable here is a composite "affect" scale which includes items measuring anger, being upset, being pleased with oneself, and being happy. In both Stages 3 and 4 (children at home), mothers with less than ten nonkin in their networks scored significantly lower than did: mothers with ten or more nonkin; fathers with either few or many nonkin associates; and wives of the same age without children at home. Put another way, the presence of children at home especially depressed the feelings of women with small networks, indicating that children were no substitute for friends; and more, that friends were an important balm for mothers. 10. The means differ at p<.001. The units here are, again, the subsample of names-one hundred fifty-nine nonkin friends for ninety-one elderly women, and sevent...

This article reports the findings of a study of single mothers who are mandated to participate in workfare programs. It examines how low-income single mothers become involved in paid work and how the structures of their personal lives and their strategies of parenthood in low-income urban environments shape their economic action. Interviews with workfare participants show how single mothers view their economic field of action and how they interpret economic opportunities and make decisions about work in the context of their obligations and commitments to their children and their close kin. This study extends sociological perspectives on the relationship between work and family life to the study of women on welfare and addresses the shortcomings of poverty policy studies that ignore the family and neighborhood contexts of welfare mothers' economic activity.

No abstract

This article provides a framework for examining how the conditions of urban, low‐income, single motherhood and the resources available through personal networks shape mothers' conduct in work‐welfare programs. It suggests how research on welfare programs ignores work‐family linkages and misses the ways economic action is embedded in social structures and communal constraints. Three rubrics of proximate context, referring to personal networks, urban environments, and moral economies, organize material indicating how patterns of personal life shape work efforts. Data from a qualitative study of mothers in AFDC work‐welfare programs provide illustrations.

This review focuses on scholarship that illuminates the ties between gendered care and persistent gender inequality. After an overview of work on gender and care across the disciplines, it examines sociologies of care and suggests how sociology might further enrich research and theory in this area. I explore the areas of work-family intersection, state care policy, and the organization of paid care work. I argue that the sociology of caregiving needs to better understand institutional effects on care and the interactions that transmit and resist them, organizational influences on paid care work, and how care policies relate to gender equality.