Acceptance for working mothers growing among Americans

After years of striving for gender equality, feminists in the US finally have a reason to smile as more Americans are becoming receptive towards working mothers, according to a new report.
Men and women have become more accepting of women working outside the home and participating in politics since 2006.
"After years of growing acceptance of women in these roles since the 1970s, this trend had stalled since the mid-1990s," lead author of the study David Cotter, a sociologist from New York, was quoted as saying in a Live Science report.
"It's a little bit more of a mystery as to why there would have been a turn toward those traditional gender role attitudes in the 1990s," he said.

The research is a result of a questionnaire asking respondents about the ideal roles for men and women.
According to the report, in 1977 66 per cent Americans thought men should work while women stay at home. By 1994, only 33 per cent believed that a male breadwinner was the ideal.

As of 2012, less than one-third of Americans believe the ideal family is one in which the husband works and the wife stays home, and 65 percent disagree that a working mother's young children suffer. And 76 percent say men and women are equally suited to a life in politics.

"If gender beliefs fall on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being perfect egalitarianism, Americans earned a composite score of 1.5 in 1977. By the mid-1990s, attitudes were a point higher, reaching 2.5. The score hovered there for a decade, only recently moving on up to 3, Cotter said.
"Of all the changes taking place in those attitudes since 1977, two-thirds of it took place in the first third of the period, none of it in the middle third, and then one-third of it here at the end," he said.
He said the women's movement and demographic changes such as increased education can explain why Americans became increasingly accepting of women outside the home since the late 1970s.

"It is encouraging to learn that approval of more egalitarian work and family arrangements has been growing again and is especially strong among millennials," sociologist Youngjoo Cha, another researcher said while referring to Cotter's work.