January

Simone Polillo
"The Local Sources of Money: Elites, Banks and State Power"
January 17

Helen Marrow
"Hispanic Immigration and the Future of the U.S. Color Line"
January 31

February

Zoua Vang
"Black Ghettos: Residential Segregation and Community Violence in African Immigrant and African American Neighborhoods.”
February 5, *CAB 431

Genevieve Zubrzycki
“Religious symbols and the Redefinition of the Nation in Poland and Quebec”
February 7

March

Julia Adams, Professor of Sociology, Yale University
"Poststructuralist Foundations of Social Theory, or the Unknown James Coleman"
March 13

Jonathan Eastwood, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington & Lee University
"A Sociological Approach to Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution'"
March 27

April

Pamela Stone, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College, CUNY
"The Rhetoric and Reality of 'Opting Out'"
April 10

The decades-long surge of married women into the U.S. labor force appears to have stalled or even reversed in the mid-1990's. The downturn has been noted among college-educated women, especially mothers of very young children, and journalists have made much of highly educated mothers "opting out" of successful careers to stay home with their children. The questions are how many of them actually do so and why? In this talk, I discuss trends in opting out since the mid-1980's and talk about my recent book, an in-depth study of women who fit the opt-out demographic: married mothers who had formerly worked as professionals and managers. Results challenge the conventional understanding of these women's decisions as reflecting a change in work-family preferences or a return to domesticity, and point instead to the role of long hours, high demands, and inadequate flexible work options in forcing high-achieving women into either-or, or all-or-nothing decisions. The implications of these findings for women's status, gender inequality, and workplace policies are discussed.

Judith Lorber, Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College and Graduate School, CUNY
"Sports: The Playing Grounds of Gender"
April 17

Masters Colloquium
Presenters: Matthew Jones, Allan McCoy, David Morris, Matthew Morrison, Bobbie Robertson
April 24

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