Women and Class Analysis: In Defence of the Conventional View

Sociology

Volumn 17, Issue 4, 1983, Pages 465-488

  Goldthorpe, John H ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84972622965     PISSN: 00380385     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0038038583017004001     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. See, e.g., Joan Acker, ‘Women and Social Stratification: A case of Intellectual Sexism’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78, 1973, and ‘Women and Stratification: A Review of Recent Literature’. Contemporary Sociology, vol. 9, 1980; Christine Delphy, ‘Women in Stratification Studies’ in Helen Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research, London, Routledge, 1981; Andrew Cooper, ‘Sex, Gender and Society’ in Ivan Reid and Eileen Wormald (eds.), Sex Differences in Britain, London, Grant McIntyre, 1982; Sheila Allen, ‘Gender Inequality and Class Formation’ in Anthony Giddens and Gavin Mackenzie (eds.), Social Class and the Division of Labour, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Cf. also Margrit Eichler, The Double Standard: A Feminist Critique of Feminist Social Science, London, Croom Helm, 1980, ch. 4, and Ann Oakley, Subject Women, London, Martin Robertson, 1981, ch. 13. An earlier influential paper was Walter B. Watson and Ernest A.T. Barth, ‘Questionable Assumptions in the Theory of Social Stratification’, Pacific Sociological Review, vol. 7, 1964
2. Talcott Parsons, ‘An Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification’ in Essays in Sociological Theory, Glencoe, Free Press, rev. ed., 1954, p. 77.
3. In addition to the paper cited above, see also in the same collection ‘Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States’, and further ‘The Social Structure of the Family’ in Ruth N. Anshen (ed.), The Family: its Future and Destiny, New York, Harper, 1949, and ‘The American Family: its Relations to Personality and the Social Structure’ in Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialisation and Interaction Process, London, Routledge, 1956.
4. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, London, Hutchinson, 1973, p. 288.
5. Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1971, pp. 14-15.
6. John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society, London, Heinemann, 1975, p. 291.
7. See, e.g., A.J. Fox and P.O. Goldblatt, Longitudinal Study: Socio-demographic Mortality Differentials, 1971-1975, London, H.M.S.O., 1982, pp. 31-3.
8. Class in a Capitalist Society, p. 104.
9. Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: a Bourgeois Critique, London, Tavistock, 1979, p. 85.
10. Class in a Capitalist Society, p. 352.
11. It is of interest to inquire just why this point should have been so systematically ignored by feminist critics. Part of the explanation at least would seem to be that they share in Acker's belief that to ‘discard the assumption of derived status or class for women and investigate the possibilities of conceptualizing women as social beings with identities and existence of their own’ is necessary to a full understanding of women's disadvantaged and subordinate position. (‘Women and Stratification’, p. 25). The logic of this view is, however, not easy to follow. Class theorists would obviously wish to reply that the dependence that the assumption in question reflects is quite fundamental to women's disadvantaged and subordinate position, and that nothing is to be gained - least of all by feminists - from seeking to disguise the fact. If it were the case that the majority of married women could be realistically regarded as having a directly determined class position, then women would be far less discriminated against as regards work-force participation than in fact they are. At the same time, it is far from clear why arguing that married women's class position is usually derived should prevent these women from being thought of as having identities and an existence of their own, or indeed be in any way disparaging to them. It would seem that the only consistent way to move on from Acker's argument is to claim, as some feminists are apparently ready to do, that a sociological practice which mirrors social reality thereby confirms and reinforces it - from which one must presumably conclude that sociologists have to hand a ready and painless method of changing the existing social order, namely, to misdescribe it. What feminists - and indeed others - might more reasonably maintain is that sociologists have not so far made much headway in accounting for the emergence and persistence of conventional sex roles and ‘patriarchal’ institutions generally. But it must here be added that - contrary to what Acker, for instance, supposes - it is by no means self-evident that a satisfactory theory of sexual inequalities will be of apiece with one of class inequalities. The exact relationship of patriarchalism and capitalism, for example, is a matter for extensive and detailed empirical inquiry and not for a priori declarations about the need for an ‘integrated’ theory - which would seem to stem from nothing more than the metaphysical belief that all great evils must have some common source.
12. Cf. Parsons, ‘The American Family’, and also Morris Zelditch, ‘Role Differentiation in the Nuclear Family’, also in Parsons and Bales (eds.), Family, Socialisation and Interaction Process.
13. John H. Goldthorpe (with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive Payne), Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 122-4, 291-4.
14. The idea of the ‘three-phase pattern’ was first popularized in Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women's Two Roles, London, Routledge, 1956, but still persists. Cf. Ann Oakley: ‘The typical pattern for women has three phases: employment, followed by fulltime domesticity, followed by a job again’. Housewife, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974, p. 78. For criticism of this view based on American data, see Glen H. Elder and Richard Rockwell, ‘The Timing of Marriage and Women's Life Patterns’, Journal of Family History, vol. 1, 1976, and Annemette Sorenson, ‘Women's Employment Patterns after Marriage’, Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Working Paper, 82-9. In part, more complex work patterns are the result of increased participation - e.g. of more women moving in and out of work between the birth of children; but it also appears that the participation of many women continues to be intermittent after their period of active motherhood is over. The data provided in the text would seem to be broadly in line with those for married women in the sample for the National Training Survey, carried out in Great Britain in 1975-6. I am extremely grateful to Peter Elias of the University of Warwick for providing me with the results of special analyses of these data.
15. See General Household Survey, 1976, London, H.M.S.O., 1978, Table 2.39(b), p. 56, and also Sheila Rothwell, ‘United Kingdom’ in Alice M. Yohalem (ed.), Women Returning to Work, London, Frances Pinter, 1980, pp. 165-7.
16. This decline may well result in part from higher levels of unemployment discouraging married women from remaining in the work-force; but the disincentive effects of taxation, National Insurance contributions and travel and other expenses would also seem important. Cf. Lorna Bourke, ‘When Married Women Cannot Afford to Work’, The Times, June 5, 1982.
17. See Karen Dunnell, Family Formation 1976, London, H.M.S.O., 1979, chs. 4-5. Cf., also Social Trends 12, London, H.M.S.O., 1982, Table 2.21, p. 41.
18. Cf., the research findings reviewed in Michael Webb, ‘The Labour Market in Reid and Wormald (eds.), Sex Differences in Britain, pp. 150-4.
19. Cp., e.g., the varying positions taken up, implicitly or explicitly, in the following: Ernest A.T. Barth and Walter B. Watson, ‘Social Stratification and the Family in Mass Society’, Social Forces, vol. 45, 1967; Marie R. Haug, ‘Social Class Measurement and Women's Occupational Roles’, Social Forces, vol. 52, 1973; Valerie Kincaid Oppenheimer, ‘The Sociology of Women's Economic. Role in the Family’, American Sociological Review, vol. 42, 1977; Albert F. Osborn and Tony C. Morris, ‘The Rationale for a Composite Index of Social Class and its Evaluation’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. XXX, 1979; Nicky Britten and Anthony Heath, ‘Women, Men and Social Class’, in Eva Gamarnikow, David Morgan, June Purvis and Daphne Taylorson (eds.), Gender, Class and Work, London, Heinemann, 1983.
20. ‘Women, Men and Social Class’, p. 60.
21. Cf., the extensive data reported in Christine Craig, Men in Manufacturing Industry, Cambridge, Department of Applied Economics, 1969.
22. See, e.g., Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, Report No. 6: Lower Incomes, London, H.M.S.O., 1978, pp. 68-9, and A. McIntosh, ‘Women at Work: a Survey of Employers’, Employment Gazette, November, 1980. The differences in question are particularly marked, as might be expected, in the case of women in part-time work.
23. Cf., Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Class Structure, ch. 5 esp., and also A. Stewart, K. Prandy and R.M. Blackburn, Social Stratification and Occupations, London, MacMillan, 1980, chs. 6-7 esp. For further evidence and discussion on the low rates of promotion of women in clerical work, see Rosemary Crompton, Gareth Jones and Stuart Reid, ‘Contemporary Clerical Work: A Case Study of Local Government’ in Jackie West (ed.), Work, Women and the Labour Market, London, Routledge, 1982. In marked contrast to men, married women appear in general to display little net upward mobility in the course of their working lives. Cf., Christine A. Greenhalgh and Mark B. Stewart, ‘Occupational Status and Mobility of Men and Women’, Warwick Economic Papers, No. 211, 1982.
24. It is of interest to note the extent to which what has been claimed factually in this section of the paper is echoed not only in married women's own accounts of their working lives (see, e.g., the paper by Crompton et al. cited in the previous note and, in the same collection, Marilyn Porter, ‘Standing on the Edge: Working Class Housewives and the World of Work') but further in the writings of feminist sociologists who have elsewhere been strong in their criticism of conventional class theory. Cf., e.g., Ann Oakley: ‘Assertions of increasing equality between the sexes are often based on employment statistics… In fact the impression of convergence is illusory… behind these statistics of employment, the traditional differentiation between women's and men's roles endures still… Women's defining role is a domestic one’. Housewife, pp. 72-3. To avoid any misunderstanding, one might add that nothing in the foregoing precludes agreement also with those who have stressed the importance, at the macro-sociological level, of changes in the extent and nature of women's work-force participation for the distribution of men within the division of labour, and in turn for the rate and pattern of their mobility and the possibilities for class formation. Cf., Elizabeth Garnsey, ‘Women's Work and Theories of Social Stratification’, Sociology, vol. 12, 1978, and Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, ch. 2.
25. ‘Women, Men and Social Class’.
26. Britten and Heath, ‘Women, Men and Social Class’, pp. 60.
27. If it is argued that often only data on husbands' and wives' employment situation will be available, then a still preferable method to joint classification - for reasons which will emerge - is that proposed by Erikson, in which the family or household is classified according to the employment situation of whichever of its members that ranks highest in an ordering according to ‘dominant influence’. See Robert Erikson, ‘Om Socio-ekonomiska Indelningar av Hushåll: Överväganden och ett förslag’, Statistisk Tidskrift, 1981.
28. It is relevant here to note the distinction introduced by Sorokin between the relatively formed - that is, ‘relatively stable and permanent’ - element of a class, which might be termed the class ‘core’, and those individuals or families who are found in particular class positions at any one time but who have only recently entered them and whose continued incumbency is doubtful. Cf., Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Mobility, Glencoe, Free Press, 1959, p. 428. From one set of class positions to another, the relative size of these two elements may vary widely, and it is possible that virtually no stability at all will be observable. For developments of this approach in more recent work, see C.J. Richardson, Contemporary Social Mobility, London, Frances Pinter, 1977, and Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Class Structure.
29. ‘Women, Men and Social Class’, pp. 55-6.