Item Detail
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13362
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3
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0
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English
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Flight from the Iron Cage : LDS Women's Responses to the Paradox of Modernization
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Harvard University
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Modernization has been defined as the adoption of a "syndrome" of social structures and beliefs which originated in Western Europe during the seventeenth century. This process contains an inherent paradox: any "modernizing" society includes primary values from both a modern-rational and a traditional-sacred world view, and these world views are contradictory to each other. As societies modernize, the work of maintaining so-called "traditional" institutions has typically been assigned to members of the population defined as "sub-rational," while "rational" individuals enact the values of modernity. Currently, as American women demand equal treatment in individualistic, "modern" terms, the society is left without capable adults to care for "traditional" institutions or dependent people. The problem of performing the labor to support two mutually exclusive value systems is usually seen as a "women's issue," when in fact is rooted in modernization, and only indirectly related to gender. This dissertation examines the dynamics of modernization among the women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I posit that women in this indigenous American religion experience an intensified form of the paradoxical definition of women's roles. Ethnographic research on "Mormon" women at a time of intense gender conflict revealed that the women responded to irreconcilable role demands by exhibiting types of stress associated with individuals who are caught between traditional and modern cultures. Women who experienced paradoxical structural pressures ultimately responded by rejecting their social context, turning to a-social forms of personal identity formation reminiscent of pre-social or charismatic action. The implication is that if sociologists are to understand the behavior of women in modernizing societies, they must examine broad social-structural dynamics rather than focusing on gender as an end in itself. The articulation of paradox of modernization illuminates gender role conflict and helps avoid the replication of contradictory cultural prescriptions by social science itself." [Author's abstract]