I concluded that Farmer's generation represented a key transition between patriarchal values and more egalitarian ones. After all, Farmer was born soon after suffrage and women were gradually becoming more visible in the public sphere.
Farmer's responses answered the second research question in the negative. The informant did not oppose women's presence in the public sphere or in positions of power. However, Farmer has trouble reconciling the belief that women are inferior social subjects with the realization that women are equal as human beings. Farmer's beliefs were informed partly by his parents. His mother and father both worked on their family farm n Pennsylvania. Although both parents visibly worked, Farmer notes that his father retained most of the political authority in the household. His father drank a lot, and yelled at his mother sometimes. Therefore, Farmer viewed the male role in the household as one of power and dominion over the woman. His early childhood experiences with male and female gender roles laid the foundation for his subsequent identity formation as an American male. The male, noted Farmer when I asked, was supposed to be the primary bread-winner of the family who would financially support his wife and children. Women, on the other hand, were naturally predisposed toward nurturing, sensitivity, and affection. Farmer emphasized that he valued women: that he thought they were "superior" in some ways to men in that they were "kinder." His responses revealed the gender stereotypes of Farmer's generation.
Regarding the possibility of social change, I was surprised to learn how open Farmer was to the possibility for gender role transformation. Perhaps because of his sister's career advancement or because of his own open-mindedness, Farmer affirmed the belief that women should play more prominent...
When asked more about his relationship with women in his personal life, Farmer indicated some conflicting feelings. For example, Farmer's wife had never learned how to drive and he did not view her dependence on him as any symbol of inequality. Farmer rarely cooked and when asked about their household chores, the informant laughed. "Oh no! I don't do that -- Emily does!" Farmer's friends are all male, and his wife also has a group of female friends who she spends time with once or twice a week. Their separate social spheres are divided by gender, more even than ethnicity or social class. Thus, gender has a strong bearing on the identity formation of men and women in Farmer's generation.
Concerned with how identity formation and gender, I asked several questions that would determine how Farmer formed his concept of masculinity. The informant revealed that his peer group certainly viewed women as separate from men. Strikingly self-aware, Farmer noted that he was exposed to belief systems that posited women's intellectual inferiority. Farmer also admitted that during adolescence and well into adulthood he and men from his generation believed that women had little interest in sex but stated that his beliefs had changed radically since the time he was a teenager.
Therefore, my central hypothesis that men from Farmer's generation were stymied by patriarchal values would only partially prove true. On the one hand, Farmer did show that he and other men from his generation did not fully accept women as social equals. On the other hand, Farmer indicated at least an intellectual acceptance of the idea of gender equality. Willingness to create social change may be the hallmark of the generation that preceded the one that characterized the revolutionary values of the late 1960s.
