Critical Review of Ehrlich's “The Male Sociologist’s Burden: The Place of Women in Marriage and Family Texts.”

Ehrlich, Carol. “The Male Sociologist’s Burden: The Place of Women in Marriage and Family Texts.” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 33, Issue 3, Sexism in Family Studies (Aug 1971), 421-430.

In her article “The Male Sociologist’s Burden”, Carol Ehrlich examines the idea of women as found in six marriage and family texts; her findings show that these texts, although they claim to be purely factual “compilations of the accumulated knowledge of social science are… primarily collections of folklore and social stereotypy” (430). She compares and contrasts the messages of each of her sources, whose publication dates range from 1964 to 1968, using them to support or counteract one another, ultimately showing how pigeonholed the woman figure is.
Ehrlich begins her article by taking a look at each author’s set of beliefs as defined in their texts. She starts with examining William Kephart’s study of parallels in animal and human sexual behavior, or...