Reviews : Shere Hite: The Hite report: Growing up under patriarchy London: Bloomsbury, 1994
Abstract
ReviewsShere Hite: The Hite report: Growing up under patriarchy London: Bloomsbury, 1994 SAGE Publications, Inc.1998DOI: 10.1177/110330889800600105 HedvigEkerwald Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden In young people's socialization how much of our interaction is formed by our patriarchal family model? What we think is fully individual such as our parents' personalities can be analysed partly as social roles belonging to our society. When a girl says she fears her father or that she does not want to be like her mother this might be part of patriarchal regularities although she usually interprets it in psychological terms. Among Shere Hite's 3000 respondents in her study on young people's socialization in the family, Growing Up UnderPatriarchy, as many as about 30 per cent of the girls and 40 per cent of the boys were 'scared of' their father. In the patriarchal family the father dominates both mother and children. Hite gives us a genuinely sociological analysis. What we interpret as generational conflicts or personality effects she re-interprets as results of this age-old family model where women are inferior. This means giving historical and social explanations in a society where family relationships normally are psychologically interpreted. Even for the short time period