Gender, Emotion, and the Family

Do women express their feelings more than men? Popular stereotypes say they do, but in this text, Leslie Brody breaks with conventional widsom. Her work integrates biological and socio-cultural developments to explore the nature and extent of gender differences in emotional expression, as well as th [...]
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Do women express their feelings more than men? Popular stereotypes say they do, but in this text, Leslie Brody breaks with conventional widsom. Her work integrates biological and socio-cultural developments to explore the nature and extent of gender differences in emotional expression, as well as the endlessly complex questions of how such differences come about. Nurture, far more than nature, it is argued, emerges as the stronger force in fashioning gender differences in emotional expression. Brody shows that whether and how men and women express their feelings varies widely form situation to situation and from culture to culture, and depends on a number of particular characteristics including age, ethnicity, cultural background, power, and status. Especially pertinent is the organization of the family, in which boys and girls elicit and absorb different emotional strategies. Brody also examines the importance of gender roles, whether in the family, the peer group, or the culture at large, as men and women use various patterns of emotional expression to adapt to power and status imbalances.