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The accepted founders of sociology were all men (as we saw in chapter 1), and they paid scant regard either to the differential experience of men and women or to gender relations. In any event, their ideas tended to be descriptive and theoretically unsatisfactory. For example, differences between women and men are discussed occasionally in Durkheim’s writings, but not in a consistently sociological manner (Rahman and Jackson 2010: 56). Durkheim (1952 [1897]) suggested that, while men are ‘almost entirely’ products of society, women are ‘to a far greater extent’ products of nature, leading to differing bases for identities, tastes and inclinations. Sociologists today do not accept this stereotypical conclusion, which illegitimately essentializes female identities.

Marx and Engels’s ideas are substantially at odds with those of Durkheim. For them, differences in power and status between men and women mainly reflect other divisions, especially class divisions. According to Marx, in the earliest forms of human society (primitive communism), neither gender nor class divisions were present. The power of men over women came about only as class divisions appeared. Women then came to be seen as a type of ‘private property’, owned by men through the institution of marriage. The only way for women to be freed from their situation of bondage would be when capitalism is overthrown and class divisions are eliminated.

Again, few sociologists today would accept this analysis. Class is not the only factor shaping social divisions which affect relations between men and women; among others are ethnicity and cultural background. For instance, it might be argued that women in some minority ethnic groups have more in common with men in that group than they do with women in the ethnic majority. In recent years, sociologists have become much more interested in intersectionality – the ways in which divisions of class, gender and ethnicity combine or ‘intersect’ to produce complex forms of social inequality (Brewer 1993; P. H. Collins 2000). Intersectionality does not mean the end of class analysis, but it does point to the need for more research which crosses conventional theoretical boundaries.

Since it left very little to build on in relating issues of gender to more established forms of theoretical thinking, the classical legacy bequeathed a difficult problem to sociologists. How should ‘gender’ as a general category be brought within existing sociological theories? The issues involved here are important and bear directly on the challenge that feminist scholars have laid down. There is no real dispute that a great deal of sociology in the past either ignored women or operated with an inadequate understanding of gender relations. Yet bringing the study of women into sociology is not the same as dealing with issues of gender, because gender concerns relations between women and men. For example, research into gender has explored changing forms of masculinity as well as femininities, and, with the emergence of queer theory, the instability of the concept of gender itself has been exposed.

The next section presents a fairly brief outline of the impact of feminist theorizing on sociology, but an extended discussion of gender can be found in chapter 7, ‘Gender and Sexuality’. Taken together, these sections provide an introduction to the significance of gender in society and for sociology.