Abstract
Hawaii's multiethnic society is explored as a field for researching the impact of ethnicity on the learning of female sex roles via the life history approach. Life history data collected by the author from women of Hawaii's Chinese and Portuguese communities is drawn on for a comparison of their socialization to sex-related roles in the domestic and selected public domains during their girlhoods in the 1920s and 1930s. Discussion examines six categories of information pertinent to research of the ethnicity/sex-role relationship which the case studies suggest life histories are rich in. Possible future directions for research of the topic via the life history approach are considered.
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The preliminary work for this study was done during a seminar on the Anthropology of Women, conducted by Dr. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Spring 1979. The author wants to thank Dr. Lebra for subsequently reading an early draft of the article and commenting on it, and Ms. Susan Ezawa for typing the manuscript.
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Armstrong, M.J. Ethnicity and sex-role socialization: A comparative example using life history data from Hawaii. Sex Roles 10, 157–181 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00287772
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00287772