Читать книгу Gender and Sexuality - Stevi Jackson - Страница 19

First, find out when women won the vote in your own country or locality and whether this was after men got the vote. How does the timing of this compare with other countries/localities?

Second, try to identify a relevant women’s organization that was involved in suffrage campaigns. Was there an understanding of gender as social in their campaigns?

Some suggested starting points (and see note 8): www.womenshistory.about.com; www.now.org; www.unesco.org/women

Equal rights feminism had developed during the first wave in the late nineteenth century, its main achievement being the right of women to vote in many nations in the early twentieth century. Its influence then declined in the mid- twentieth century, partly because of a loss of momentum once the vote was achieved, and partly as women entered professional and trade union organizations for the first time in significant numbers. Historians point to a resurgence of equal rights feminism in the 1960s in both Britain and the USA, with bodies such as the National Organization for Women emerging in the USA, and smaller such groups in Britain. Crucially, this resurgence was linked to wider changes in the social status of women, particularly in terms of their increasing participation in the labour market (Banks, 1990).

In Britain and Western Europe more often than the USA or Canada, feminist politics developed in the organized labour union movements in conjunction with, and sometimes in reaction to, the politics of class. Thus, a Marxist or socialist feminist tradition re- emerged during this period, as had the equal rights tradition, but both were markedly different from first wave feminism in their emphasis on the social basis of women’s subordination, whether that was linked to employment and educational opportunities or the wider capitalist structure. Furthermore, both traditions were heavily influenced by what came to be termed radical feminism, which, for the first time, provided a range of analyses that conceptualized male domination as a social system. Feminists from all three traditions contributed to the development of a new concept: ‘gender.’

A recent dictionary of sociology entry under ‘gender’ both shows its acceptance as a major sociological concept and defines its use:

If the sex of a person is biologically determined, the gender of a person is culturally and socially constructed. There are thus two sexes (male and female) and two genders (masculine and feminine). The principal theoretical and political issue is whether gender as a socially constructed phenomenon is related to or determined by biology. (Abercrombie et al., 2006: 163)

This definition conveys the central point that the concept of gender contests biological essentialism but it does not expand on the ways in which the concept is used sociologically. For a little more insight, you can flick forward to the entry under ‘sociology of gender’, which outlines the ‘ways in which the physical differences between men and women are mediated through culture and social structure’ (Abercrombie et al., 2006: 371), thus reassuringly beginning to talk about key sociological concepts to which we can all relate. The entry goes on to mention briefly the issues of identity formation, public/ private and divisions of labour, as well as ideologies of gender. This demonstrates that there is an understanding in mainstream sociology today that gender is a key sociological concept and social division.

Weber had talked about patriarchal authority, but his use of the term was limited to how legitimate power in traditional societies was vested in male heads of household, and he did not expand his gaze to discuss men and women as socially distinct groups. Engels had similarly focused on the family as a functional unit for capitalism in that monogamous marriage ensured control of women’s reproductive sexuality so that bourgeois men could pass on their property to their ‘rightful’ heirs, but, like Weber, he saw women and men as ‘natural’ categories rather than social ones. Patriarchy is a term we will discuss in detail below, but first note that neither of these classical sociologists referred to gender in the way in which it is defined above. Early sociologists did recognize the differences between men and women’s social position, but they did not develop a way of thinking about this as fully social.

In many, especially western, cultures, gender existed as a linguistic term denoting masculine and feminine, but as a social concept it was first used in the 1950s and 1960s by psychologists such as John Money and Robert Stoller to describe socially learned aspects of male and female behaviour as distinct from the biological categories male and female. This resonated with earlier anthropological work on the variability of sex roles, particularly that of Margaret Mead (1965 [1935]), which demonstrated that masculine and feminine behaviours and roles varied across cultures. Thus, the idea that masculinity and femininity might be acquired rather than innate was gradually taking root within some academic arenas, although its influence was not always progressive. John Money’s work developed in his attempts to understand intersex infants, producing a concept of gender identity that serves to justify medical interventions to ‘correct’ anatomy (Hird, 2004: 133; see also Ch. 10.1). It was not until the 1970s that ‘gender’ became used in a critical sense, and this time lag is linked to the fact that it was only at this time that a significant number of feminist academics began focusing our attention on the social status of women as a social group, though it is important to note that there was some feminist sociological work on sex roles well before this time (see Ch. 3.4). There were two particularly influential contributions that established gender as a critical concept. The first of these was Ann Oakley’s book Sex, Gender and Society (1972), in which she argued strongly for gender to be understood as a matter of culture – with historical and cultural variations – rather than as a simple matter of biology. Following this, Gayle Rubin’s essay ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’ (1975) drew upon anthropological studies to describe how the social organization of marriage, kinship and reproduction gave rise to ‘sex/gender systems’, again making it plain that the social position of men and women, and their hierarchical relationship, could not be reduced to biological sex.

Other sociologists at that time began to produce research and theory on women’s social situation, addressing such issues as housework, employment, sexual exploitation, as well as the overall structure of male- dominated or patriarchal society. Central to all such work was the development of the idea of gender as a sociological concept. Moreover, linked to this conceptualization of gender was an identification of sexuality as a key dimension of gender inequalities, and an increasing awareness that the essentialist sex–gender system privileges heterosexuality over homosexuality and other nonreproductive behaviours.