Social Scientists Discuss Women's Studies Research

A panel of three social scientists discussed women's issues and research techniques used in the field of women's studies on Sunday night at Radcliffe's Cronkhire Graduate Center.

The discussion, cosponsored by the Murray Research Center of Radcliffe College and the National Science Foundation, culminated a day-long conference at Radcliffe about the use of archive materials to study women.

panelist Helen Lopata, a professor of Sociology at Loyola University's Center for Comparative Study of Social Roles, assessed the panel's sentiments by saying, "gender is a pervasive Identity that enters into every social role."

Lopata, whose primary field of study is the evolution of women's occupations, said that even traditionally low-status jobs-like cocktail waitressing-deserve more recognition. "In at least one dictionary of job occupations, women child care workers are defined with equal complexity as people who clean horse manure from stables," she added.

Panelist Geraldine Brookins, an associate professor of Psychology at Jackson State University, linked society's unfair images of women to insufficient sociological studies done in the field of women's issues.

Brookies, whose research focuses on the issues that Black women face in the 1980s, told the predominantly female capacity audience that modern advertising and movies inadequately depict Black women's lives.

"The images of the Black woman are as other the emasculating matriarch or the bitch goddess," Brookins said.

Panelist Regula Herzog, a research scientist at the institute of Gerontology and institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, addressed the problems again women confront. She said that menopause is "an over studied and overemphasized issue because people have historically linked menopause to witchcraft. Herzog explained that there are many more aspects of a woman's aging than hormonal changes.

Herzog added that women's longevity presents them with problems that men, with their shorter lifespans, face less often. These concerns include the problems of living in nursing homes and diseases like arthritis.