Some Consequences of Women's Emancipation

Abstract

The paper describes two kinds of consequences of women's emancipation from the family. The increasing number of educated and working women (1) makes contacts between adult men and women outside the family more frequent and (2) influences the statuses of both male and female professionals and wives of men in these professions. The contacts of male and female employees are rather infrequent and formal in the two factories studied in a small industrial town in the middle of Finland. Only white-collar women interact frequently with male colleagues. Women prefer men's company more often than men do women's. Men are also more afraid of the consequences of men's and women's interaction for peace in the family. Men's attitudes may be functional for the family but dysfunctional from the point of view of working women by excluding them from the company of most of their co-workers. The relative prestige of professional women compared with that of the men is lower in the traditional than in the modern occupations. The wives' prestige is significantly lower than that of professional women especially in the upper social strata. The prestige of the wives is most devalued by white-collar women employees, who rank the professional women highest. This is an example of the general tendency to maximize one's own group's rank. The erotic ranks of upper-class wives have been traditionally supposed to be high. The white-collar women workers may try to compensate their lower erotic ranks based on the husbands' status by stressing the importance of professional achievements of women.