Tender & Tough

Using what they call the polydiagnostic* method of assessment, Tufts University Sociologists Edward M. Bennett and Harriet M. Goodwin set out to analyze the U.S. woman as a political creature. Before the American Sociological Society convention in Washington last week, they presented their findings in the language of Freud rather than that of Carmine De Sapio or Leonard Hall.

After interviewing 384 Greater Boston housewives, they concluded that women who vote Democratic are "tender-minded" while Republican women are "tough-minded." The female Democrats "feel a social warmth in the people around them, and they feel much the same warmth in their own political party." The Republican women "appear to have the more self-oriented approach . . . They seem to have greater self-confidence and awareness of their own capacity." To them, the candidate's competence is the most important consideration; for Democrats, "the intellectual aspects" are most important--"thinking rather than doing, intention rather than action."

Independent women, the sociologists inferred, are rather frigid politically. They are not the critics, boosters or intellectuals, or the overemotional. "With only limited political loyalty, they perhaps respond to the unique candidate they feel will do them the least harm."

* "By limiting the subject to a fixed language for responding to any question, the method supplies quantified results of known reliability."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.