Far from approving politicians who, at the slightest whiff of campus unrest, hasten to invite disgruntled students to take up majors less overcrowded than the human sciences. I believe that the study of sociology ought to be encouraged everywhere and expanded broadly: first in itself and for itself, in the faculties of humanities and of the social sciences; and second as a complementary discipline, in the faculties of science and in the schools of law and medicine, and also - but there at high doses - in the schools of ‘political science’ and at the Ecole nationale d’Administration.

Luhmann remarks that it was possible to distinguish oneself from others even before the age of the mass media - in a stratified society, for instance, by the family one was born into. Moreover, psychological research seems to indicate that ‘the difference of one’s own I from other individuals is given from the start, meaning as early as a few days after birth.’ (Luhmann 2000a, 112). Obviously, we not only perceive ourselves as somehow distinct in all kinds of societies, we even do so ‘naturally.’ Still, Luhmann assumes that under the conditions of functional differentiation, peculiar types of identity construction emerge. In early modernity, the theater and the novel (an early example of mass media) presented complex individuals. The audience or the readership witnessed a person’s motives and character traits, how an identity was formed and related to other identities. This led to an increasing focus on personality development - besides a social status and its characteristics, one was also expected to have a unique identity, biography, and self. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‘the problem of “self-realization” is invented and is taken up and disseminated by the mass media. INdividuals are encouraged to believe that, although they have without doubt been really alive since conception, and certainly since birth, they must become even more real (or unreal) than they already are’ (Luhmann 2000a, 114). The mass media present us with the schemata for ‘self-realization.’ In order to be a modern personality we have to have a personality that goes beyond our functional identities. It is not enough to simply be a mother, a lawyer, and on the city council - one has to be something ‘unique’ as well. One has to have an identity, a history. One has to be as special and unique as everyone else is. The mass media display all these uniformly unique characters - and the minds resonate with these schemata. And in turn, of course, the mass media resonate with mental individuality schemata.

Of course, statistics that show that, on average, married women curtail their employment hours when they become parents cover over a wide diversity of decisions by different individual mothers. Some mothers continue to work full-time, others drop out of the labor force, and many others work part-time. In 2000, 78% of mothers with children under age 18 in the house were employed, and of those, 77% were employed full-time (Bianchi et al. 2006, p. 46). Of mothers with at least one child under age one year, however, only 46% were in the labor force. By the (p. 151 ) time their kids were older than six, 73% were in the labor force. Although there has been a popular discussion recently about whether educated mothers are increasingly opting out of the labor force to care for their children, recent studies contest this (Stone 2007). Most educated mothers continue to be highly involved in the labor force. Those who do drop out for a period to take care of their children typically report doing so because of the prejudice and inflexibility they as mothers encounter from their employers rather than from their own positive choice to stay at home (Stone 2007).

The arrival of children not only changes the gender organization within the family but also substantially alters men’s and women’s social networks outside the family (Munch, McPherson, and Smith-Lovin 1997). Taking on the home- and child-centered tasks of motherhood reduces the size of women’s social networks when their children are preschool age and reduces their frequency of contact with those they know outside the family. Cultural assumptions about the duties of motherhood, then, enclose women within the family and reduce their contacts in the outside world. The arrival of children does not reduce the size of men’s networks. It does, however, increase men’s contact with kin. These changes, then, draw both men and women into a more domestic social pattern while their children are small, but women’s access to contacts outside the domestic sphere are restricted in ways that men’s are not.

Outside network contacts bring people information, opportunities, and material resources. Also, the contemporary organization of the work world is one in which the childbearing years coincide with the critical years of career building. As a result, the restrictive impact of childbearing on women’s but not men’s networks disproportionately disadvantages women’s career contacts at a critical juncture. The effect can be a lifetime disadvantage in earnings and career success. In assigning them primary responsibility for child rearing, then, gender schemas alter women’s social contacts with others in ways that reinforce gender inequality in the work world. We see again, then, the interdependence between gender inequality in the division of household labor and gender inequality in the world of work.