In your analysis of genders and social stratification you seem to affirm that the more a woman can obtain sexual equality in the job market, the higher condition of actual equality she will obtain her in family. Is this equal involvement in the productive system the only variable having an effect on the power relationships within a couple? Can your model of rituals be useful in understanding the rise of a feminist consciousness? And what could be the role of technologies, such as – for example – the electrical household appliances freeing the woman from a part of her household labour, or the TV allowing the woman to share in culture and identities which are usually exclusively male?
Yes, there are multiple conditions operating here. The most important effect of women finding good-paying jobs in the labor force has been that, compared to past historical conditions, many women do not directly depend upon a man – husband or father – for economic support, and hence are freed from the enclosure of a household. This means also becoming freed from the rituals which took place in the household, and which tended to have an ideological effect even on women’s consciousness – traditionally this was mainly the ritualistic identity of women with their families, social status of their households, and religion. The mobilization of young women to carry out their own rituals, outside the family [often in educational settings, or in the context of social movement meetings] was at the center of the waves of feminism in the 20^th century. As to technology – household appliances themselves had an ambiguous effect, since these tended to make women raise their standards of what a socially respectable household should be, so that they tended to increase the amount of household labor in many respects during the middle of the 20^th century – especially in the 1950s. The effects of a new technology is always subordinate to the social interactions that it is embedded in. I notice that today the most liberated young people – at least this is true in the Usa – tend to have jettisoned the idea of having a nice household; the technology is available for them to keep it clean and neat, but the cultural ideal goes in the opposite direction. It is a kind of cultural antinomianism against the traditional appearance of the household.

In Italy, as in all probability in the Usa, the controversy about the abortion is always up to date. In your book Sociological Insight, now translated in Italy (L’intelligenza sociologica), you give an interesting analysis of the antiabortion movement, the ritual and symbolic features of this group, its need to regain its power as an elite in decline, its antimodernism, etc. Can you provide us with a synthetic explanation of your deep insights about that?
The anti-abortion movement seems to have passed its peak in the Usa. It has had strong symbolic resonances, on one side representing the defense of the family and of traditional morality; on the other side, “choice” was a slogan of the woman’s movement, which achieved its successes by mobilizing women against the traditional household. Choice in matters of sexual behavior means not only the possibility to choose abortion, but also in the larger symbolic and practical context, the choice of women to control their own sexuality. It implies that women could do what men had traditionally done, have sex apart from marriage and apart from the intention of having children. In many respects this battle has been won in the Usa, and the anti-abortion movement is a kind of rear guard of traditionalism. The new battleline has moved on to other symbolic issues such as gay marriage. From a Durkheimian perspective, as I have discussed above, this will not be the last controversy. Ritual conflicts over symbols will continue in the future, probably as long as human societies exist.