Socialization, life situations, and gender-role attitudes regarding the family among white American women

There are two major theoretical perspectives explaining differences in gender-role attitudes: the socialization or social-learning theory, and situational theory in the form of macrosituational and microsituational (microstructural) hypotheses. In this article, we synthesize the two theories. We use data from the 1985 General Social Survey to evaluate this synthetic theory for white women in the United States. The findings show that socialization, represented by women's educational attainment being influenced by their mothers' educational attainment, has no direct impact on gender-role attitudes. Socialization does indirectly influence attitudes via women's life situations, as represented by women's life course stages and the kin composition of their social networks. Life situations are more contemporaneous than socialization and, thus, have direct effects on family-related gender-role attitudes.