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This article presents information related to a business meeting. The annual AKD business meeting was held on August 31, 1986, at the New York Hilton. Jerry Michel, scholar at the Memphis State University and AKD President presided the meeting. Those present were: Candace Clark, Helen Clarke, Al Clarke, Ken Davidson, David Demo, Marie Fuller, Rose Helper, Mark Butter, Lyn Lofland, Mike Malec, Betty Maynard, Annabelle Motz, Wayne Seelbach, Don Shoemaker, Jim Skipper, Jim Williams, Kenneth Wilson and Donna Darden. In addition to normal items of business, the following announcements and decisions were made at the meeting. The winners of the 1986 paper competition were as follows First prize: Tracey Watson, Skidmore College, Second prize: Jane Melada, Montclair State and third prize: William Axinn, Cornwell. Watson's paper, "Women Athletes and Athletic Women: The Dilemmas and Contradictions of Managing Incongruent Identities," will be published in the journal "Sociological Inquiry." The Council voted to name Dennis Peck, scholar at the University of Alabama-Bitmingham, as new editor of the journal.

Among the literature considered for issues pertaining to gender in the 1950s is David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), John Seeley, et al., Crestwood Heights (1956), William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (1956), Jules Henry, Culture against Man, and essays by Talcott Parsons on the family. The paper shows how the authors apparently document the modernization of gender and the family by ignoring or downplaying conventional and conservative factors. In fact, they were more sanguine than even their own evidence warranted, although they seemed unaware of this. By seeing only progressive indicators they neglected the constraints on women, often identified as the "feminine mystique." Three gender and family issues are considered for actual evidence about what was happening in the 1950s but also for contradictions in the authors' work that yield insights as well. These are whether feminine and masculine sex roles were converging in modern America, the development of companionship marriage, and the issue of "maternal overinvolvement" (or the domineering mother) in childrearing. The work under consideration suggests contradictory gender messages and developments in the postwar period, indicating a period in which possibilities for equality between the sexes were being both created and denied to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]