Abstract: There is broad agreement that opinions toward women liberalized in the latter 20th century on a wide range of issues in the United States, including the role of women in work, politics, and the family. However, there is a striking lack of consensus on recent trends, with scholars variously claiming that there has been continued progress, a stall, or even a reversal. Given that trends cannot be simultaneously progressing, stalling, and declining, this leads us to ask: what has actually happened to the "progressive revolution » in gender attitudes? To answer this question, in this article we analyze nearly a half-century of temporally-structured data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) to uncover intra- and inter-cohort trends in gender attitudes across multiple domains, including reproductive rights. Our study not only expands the number of items analyzed, but also extends the time span of previous, widely-cited studies while incorporating an examination of the convergence or divergence of trends across key social strata such as gender, political ideology, social class, and educational attainment. Furthermore, we adopt a modeling strategy that is, drawing on the insights of Ryder (1965), explicitly cohort-based, diachronic (rather than synchronic), and straightforwardly descriptive, providing a basis for consensus in a literature with disparate conclusions. Our analyses provide evidence for what we call an "uneven revolution" across multiple domains, characterized by a progressive revolution in political and work roles, but a plateauing and even reversal in attitudes towards working mothers, employment equity, and reproductive rights. Moreover, we find that, while for most items gaps in trends have maintained across key social strata, support for reproductive rights has converged across racial and religious groups but diverged dramatically across ideological groups. Taken together, these results suggest there has been a shift from overt, Comstock-style sexism to "laissez-faire sexism," in which overall support for gender equality is coupled with more subtle, stereotypical beliefs about women as well as ongoing resistance to policies explicitly upholding womens’ rights. We conclude with thoughts on future directions for research on gender attitudes using population-level data.
Link to study: Whither the Progressive Revolution? Trends in Attitudes toward Women in the United States, 1972-2021
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