Personal Influence and the Bracketing of Women's History

Abstract

This article reviews both what Personal Influence revealed about the two-step flow within women's inter-personal networks and what it failed to capture about women's experiences during the tumultuous changes in gender roles between 1945, when the data were collected, and 1955, when the study was published. One of the central contradictions of the Decatur Study is that it simultaneously disguises that it is women who are being studied here yet universalizes them as representative of the general population. But the article also argues that despite the blind spots and ahistoricity of Personal Influence, it was a crucial reminder that women, despite being individual targets of much media fare, were also embedded in social networks through which they influenced other women and were, in turn, influenced by them.