Chapter 2 : Sex and gender

Sex and gender

Introduction

• The biblical quotation from Genesis 3:16 (Eve's original sin) is viewed by sociologists as a mythological justification for women's subordinate position.
• Historically, women's status across the vast majority of human societies is characterised by five generalisations:

1. Women produce children.
2. Women are mothers and wives.
3. Women do the cooking, cleaning, sewing and washing.
4. Women take care of men and are subordinate to male authority.
5. Women are largely excluded from high-status occupations and from positions of power.

• Some anthropologists and sociologists argue that a society where women do not have an inferior status to men has never existed.

📌 Exam Tidbits

• 5 generalisations of women's historical status: child-producers, mothers/wives, domestic workers, subordinate to men, excluded from power.

Feminism and 'malestream' sociology

• Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace and Melissa Tyler (2005) identify five main criticisms of malestream sociology advanced by feminists:

1. Research was mainly conducted about men (e.g., early education/work studies used all-male samples).
2. Results from all-male samples were falsely generalised to all people.
3. Areas of concern to women were ignored (e.g., no sociological studies of housework or childbirth before the 1970s).
4. When included, women were presented in a distorted, sexist way (e.g., early female criminality studies assumed women were normally passive/law-abiding, so female criminals must be deeply flawed).
5. Sex and gender were just "added on" as variables, ignoring theories that justified female subordination (e.g., Talcott Parsons' functionalist view of women's domestic role).

• Abbott et al. (2005) state: "at best no recognition that women's structural position and consequent experiences are not the same as men's and that sexual difference is therefore an important explanatory variable; and at worst women's experiences are deliberately ignored or distorted."
• Progress since the 1970s (Abbott et al., 2005):
• Revived/reconstructed areas: sexuality, the body, identity, cultural sociology.
• Significant feminist impact: family, health, education, crime, age, popular culture, mass media.
• No major impact: class stratification, politics, sociological theory.
• While feminist sociology may not have achieved everything that Abbott et al. would like it to, there is no doubt that sociology is a lot…