- Technology, labor-saving devices, and the "decline of motherhood" as a full-time occupation.
- The population explosion and birth control with its powerful effects on norms and decisions regarding number of children.
- Legislation and federal regulations providing a legal context for improving the status of women in education and work.
- The Women's Movement which has highlighted issues and concerns about equal rights in a variety of sectors and the concomitant movement for men's liberation.
- New life styles and female sense of identity-the movement toward a more androgynous society in which roles in work and family are shared, diverse family patterns are acknowledged, and women are risking different kinds of patterns and self-definitions based on their own needs.
- Increasing numbers of part-time jobs and day-care centers making part-time work and more humanized daycare facilities more available.
- Continuing education with its opportunities for women to enter and re-enter education and/or work and to update or retrain for new fields.
- Breakdown of occupational and career stereotypes so that continuous career patterns and dual or equal partnership marriage patterns are becoming more common and both male and female occupational stereotypes are being reduced.
There is no full-blown theory of female career development. While most of the career development literature has dealt with male populations, Super (1957) postulated a "Logical Scheme" of women's career patterns. He identified seven kinds of female patterns, including what he labels the stable homemaking, the conventional, the stable working pattern, a double-track pattern, the interrupted pattern, the unstable pattern and multiple trial pattern. The first attempt of any major theorist to direct his attention toward female participation in the world of work, Super's descriptive schema was prefaced with the somewhat prescriptive statement, "Woman's role as child-bearer makes her the keystone of the home and, therefore, gives homemaking a central place in her career."
Others also have offered descriptions of women's patterns by socio-economic divisions. In 1968, for example, Psathas suggested the importance of cultural and situational factors and chance elements in the environment which limit women's freedom of vocational choice. Anastasi (1969) identified the blue-collar pattern, the active volunteer, the interim job, the late-blooming career, and the double-life pattern. Zytowski (1969), like Super, began his "contribution toward a theory" with the assumption that the modal role of woman is homemaker. He then identified three factors which affect female vocational development: (1) age of entry into an occupation, (2) span of participation, and (3) degree of participation. Combinations of these elements yield three different vocational patterns which he labeled the mild vocational, the moderate vocational, and the "unusual" (the latter being the career-oriented woman).
These theories are important not because they provide the last word on women's career development but because they open the doors to research and provide some beginning attempts to understand women in other than traditional stereotypic roles. They also offer support for the thesis that women's life patterns are not uniform and that a variety of life styles and multiple roles are possible, desirable, and feasible for women as well as for men.
Sex Role Socialization
There is another growing body of literature on women's growth and development that offers startling evidence of the limits on that growth. Although space does not allow detailed summary here, the studies of early sex role socialization present convincing evidence of the programming of girls and boys for prescribed roles (Hochschild, 1973; Hartley, 1960; Maccoby, 1966; Weitzman et al., 1972). The textbook messages are clear: boys are active, outdoor, strong, and breadwinners; girls are passive, dependent, weak, and homemakers; boys need to be able to be smart, to take care of themselves, boss, do a variety of jobs; girls are to stay behind, watch, wait, work puzzles, help boys, and stay home (New Jersey Commission on Women, 1972). In one book of phonics, the 21 consonants are boys, the 5 vowels are girls. The girls all have something wrong with them; when put with the consonants, the girls lose their names and their identities. One book about girls shows a defected little girl sitting on the steps asking, almost plaintively, "What can I do?" The parallel book about boys shows a standing, active, happy boy saying, "What I can do". Girls group up narcissistic, asking "How will I look? What will I wear?" Boys learn early that they can be, as one pre-school book for four to six-year-olds suggests,
A pirate, a sailor, a gypsy, a knight, An actor, a cowboy, a king. I'll be strong, it shouldn't take long, I'll be five by spring.
That this programming is reinforced in early childhood became evident recently at my daughter's sixth birthday party. Having bought a variety of inexpensive role-free gifts for the children to fish out of an imaginary pond, I let the children fish randomly for such toys as police set, doctor set, binoculars, jump ropes, dental set, nurse set, etc. While the game was in progress, I was surprised to find one of the girls in tears. When asked what the matter was, she replied that she had gotten a dental set and that was for boys; she wanted jewelry instead. It was interesting, however, that one of the other girls, whose father was a dentist, also had randomly fished out a dental set; she was pleased because her father wanted her to become a dentist (she was one of three daughters).
Obviously, we are not trying to force children to make choices regarding what they want to be at the tender age of six; we do want them to fantasize and develop their sexual identity (as different from traditional sex roles). However, such examples are significant because as studies such as those by Goodman and Schlossberg (1972) have shown children link occupations with sexes and begin the premature occupational foreclosure process early in life.
Female Self-concepts and Aspirations
What does this early conditioning do to female self-concepts and aspirations? Matthews and Tiedeman (1964) found that girls who had expressed strong vocational goals in junior high had shifted to marriage goals in senior high, although the more recent study by Rand and Miller (1972) suggested that a new cultural imperative for women was being expressed in the options perceived by girls in junior high, senior high, and college-that of the dual role of career and marriage. Other studies have cited women's lack of vocational goals and realistic planning (Lewis, 1965; Zytowski, 1969) though more recent studies, such as the follow-up study on Project Talent population, reveal girls as showing more concern for career planning and wanting more control over their own lives (Flanagan and Jung, 1971).
Horner's widely quoted study of female career motivation (1968), though recently replicated with different results (Hoffman, 1974), does give cause for reflection. Academically talented college females, asked to complete a story about "Anne, who was graduating at the top of her medical class," revealed all kinds of "fear of success" themes, fantasies that it couldn't be true-having Anne drop to eighth in the class and marrying the boy at the top; seeing her as an acne-faced bookworm experiencing feelings of rejection, loneliness, and doubts about her femininity; having her see a counselor who suggests that she try nursing, and the like. The young women simply could not cope with the image of Anne as a competent, feminine person who might be able to have a successful career and marriage. In another oft-quoted study of Broverman et al. (1970), mental health practitioners were asked to describe a mature, well-adjusted man, woman, and person. The descriptions for the well-adjusted person and well-adjusted man coincided. However, the well-adjusted woman was described as more submissive, less independent, less adventurous, more easily influenced, less aggressive, less competitive, more emotional, excitable, and vain, and less interested in science and mathematics. While the results of self-concept studies are conflicting, some of the investigations of female self-concepts have found that girls tend to devalue themselves and other girls and that both boys and girls value males more than females. These studies seem to indicate a number of factors which mitigate against women feeling very good about themselves as achieving, motivated, participating human beings.
