II. Sociological perspectives on Gender.
Sociology as a social science
• Sociology may be defined very broadly as ‘the
scientific study of human society and social
behavior’, or social interactions.
• The very origin of the word ‘sociology’ comes
from Latin word socius (companion) and the
Greek ology (study of).
• Sociology is commonly described as one of the
social sciences.
Science has two major goals:
• to describe particular things or events
and
• to propose and test general principles that
explain those things and events.
As a science, sociology shares these goals:
like all sciences, sociology is rooted in certain
theoretical orientations and uses specific
methods for developing and testing its ideas.
These theories and methods were formulated in
response to the historical climate in which
sociology emerged as a distinct discipline.
Classical theorists
• Although a concern with the nature of society can be
found throughout the history of Western thought ,
Sociology emerged as a separate field of study in
Europe during the 19th century.
• Historically the word ‘sociology’ was first used by
Auguste Comte (1798-1857).
• In Comte’s work , Sociology was to be the highest
achievement of science, producing knowledge of the
laws of social world equivalent to our knowledge of the
laws of nature.
• Comte identified two major areas that sociology should
concentrate on: social statistics – the study of how the
various institutions of society are interrelated, focusing
on order, stability and harmony, - and social dynamics
– the study of complete societies and how they develop
and change over time.
During the 19th century sociology
developed rapidly under the influence of
four scholars of highly different
orientations.
Despite these differences in aims and
theories, however, these men – Karl
Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile
Durkheim and Max Weber – were
responsible for shaping sociology into a
relatively coherent discipline.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883) stated that the entire history of
human societies may be seen as the history of class
conflict: the conflict between those who own and
control the means of production and those who work for
them.
• He believed that ownership of the means of
production in any society determines the distribution of
wealth, power and even the ideas of that society.
• The power of the wealthy is derived not just from their
control of the economy, but from their control of the
political, educational, and religious institutions as
well.
• Marx’s interests focused on the stresses and strains of
society. His perspective is called conflict theory.
•
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) viewed societies as
constantly evolving from primitive to industrial and saw
society as analogous to a living organism.
• He was the first who introduced the term evolution into
the literature of science – by evolution Spencer meant
change from simple to complex forms.
• He argued that just as the individual organs of a living
creature are interdependent and must be understood in
terms of their specialized contributions to the living whole,
so, too, various component structures of society are
interdependent. They serve special functions necessary
to ensure society’s survival as an integrated entity.
• Spencer’s ideas became part of doctrine that came to be
known as Social Darvinism. Spencer reasoned from
Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest – that people
who could not successfully compete in the industrial word
were poorly adapted to their environment and therefore
inferior. These ideas were later used to justify social
inequality.
• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) believed
that individuals are exclusively the product
of their social environment, that society
shapes people in every possible way.
• Because Durkheim was primarily
interested how society molds the
individual, he focused on the forces that
hold society together.
• The point of view, often called the
functionalist theory or perspective
remains today one of the dominant
approaches to the study of society.
• Max Weber (1864-1920). Much of his work is an
attempt to clarify, criticize, and modify the works
of Max.
• Weber showed that economic control does not
necessarily result in prestige and power. He
stated that ideologies sometimes influence
the economic system, showing that religion
could be a belief system that contributed to the
creation of new economic conditions and
institutions (‘The protestant ethic and the sprit of
capitalism).
Most sociology courses still point to the
achievements of Marx, Weber and Durkheim
in laying the theoretical foundations of the
modern discipline.
Theoretical perspectives
•
•
•
•
Scientists need a set of working assumptions to guide them in
their work. These assumptions suggest which problems are
worth investigating and offer a framework for interpreting the
results of studies. Such sets of assumptions are known as
paradigms.
What is paradigm? It can be defined as ‘a fundamental image of
the subject matter within a science. It serves to define what
should be studied, what questions should be asked, and
what rules should be followed in interpreting the answers
obtained’ (Ritzer).
In other words, a paradigm guides the scientist in choosing the
problems to be studied, in selecting the methods for studying
them, and in explaining what is found.
Sociology is a multiple-paradigm science; that is, it comprises
a number of competing paradigms.
Functionalism, or structural
functionalism
•
•
•
Functionalism, or structural functionalism, as it is
often called, is rooted in the writings of Spencer and
Durkheim and work of American scholars (Talcott
Prasons, 1902-1979; Robert K.Merton, 1910–2003).
Functionalists view society as a system of highly
interrelated structures or parts that function or
operate together rather harmoniously.
In other words, society is a stable, orderly system in
which the majority of members share a common set
of values, beliefs, and behavioral expectations that
may be called societal consensus.
Functionalism, or structural
functionalism
•
•
•
Change, then, must come about slowly, in an
evolutionary way; rapid social change in any
element/interrelated part of society would likely to be
disruptive and, therefore, dysfunctional for the system
as a whole.
This theory analyzes society by asking what function is
served by each part of society.
Functionalism is limited in one regard, however: the
preconception that societies normally are in balance or
harmony makes it difficult to account for how social
changes come about.
Conflict theory
• Conflict theory views society as being in constant state
of social conflict with only temporarily stable periods.
• Social change pushed forward by social conflict is the
normal state of affairs.
• Social order results from dominant groups making sure
that subordinate groups are loyal to the institutions that
are the dominant groups’ sources of wealth, power, and
prestige.
• Conflict theorists are concerned with the issue of who
benefits from particular social arrangements and how
those in power maintain their positions.
• Rooted in the works of Karl Marx, modern conflict theory
has been refined and applied to a wide variety of
conflicts that occur in society.
Symbolic Interactionism
• Symbolic Interactionism – a sociological theory
that is concerned with the meanings people
place on their own and one another’s
behavior.
• Because most human activity takes place in
social situations – in the presence of other
people – we must fit what we as individuals
do with what the other people in the same
situation are doing.
• We go about our lives with the assumptions
that most people share our definitions of basic
social situations. This agreement on definitions
and meanings is the key to human
interactions.
Classical tradition and gender
• With few exceptions, the best that can be said
for classical tradition is that gender issues were
peripheral (not important);
• At worst, some theorists based their ideas on
biological determinism to justify gender
inequalities.
• Several early founders of sociology assumed
that men and women are innately different and
unequal in their intellectual, emotional and
moral capacities.
•
•
•
•
Herbert Spencer, the founder of British sociological
theory, began with liberal feminist ideas:
in his book ‘Social Statistics” there was a chapter ‘The
rights of Women’, where he argued that men and
women deserve equal rights and that there were only
trivial mental differences between them.
After 4 years he had embarked on Social Darwinism and
decided that biology (not culture) produced profound
sex differences.
Women, whose brains are smaller, are deficient in the
sense of justice and reasoning ability required of all life
beyond the care of husband and children.
Moreover, women naturally prefer to be protected by a
powerful man. Permitting women to enter public life
would be therefore antithetical to human progress.
The founder of French sociology, Auguste
Comte echoed these sentiments:
• Because of their emotional and spiritual
‘superiority’ women are perfectly fit for family
and domestic life, but their state of ‘perpetual
infancy’ and intellectual inferiority to men render
them unfit to anything else.
• Similar stereotypes about the innate natures of
women and men, and conclusions about the
appropriate roles and status of each, were
repeated by founders of German (Ferdinand
Tönnies , 1855-1936) and Italian (Vilfredo
Pareto, 1848– 1923 ) sociology.
• French sociologist Emile Durkheim also based on
biological explanation while recognizing women’s social
subordination.
• In his famous book ‘Suicide’ he argued that women
have fewer ‘sociability needs’, are more ‘instinctive’,
have less developed ‘mental life’, and , therefore, are
more easily satisfied. Men are more ‘complex’, and their
psychological balance is more precarious and in need of
the constraining protections afforded by existing marital
agreements.
• Durkheim also referred to the topics of Gender in the
book ‘The division of labor in society’ where he
argued that increasing physical and cultural
differentiation have evolved over time between the
sexes, allowing for increasing specialization of labour
between them and, therefore, ‘conjugal solidarity’. A
state of gender similarity and equality is a ‘primitive’ one
associated with unstable marital unions.
• Proponents of classical Marxist theory were
well aware that gender arrangements are both
product of social life and inequitable.
• The most fully developed statement of this
approach, Friedrich Engels’ (1820-1895) ‘The
origin of the family, private property and the
state’, is an evolutionary theory describing
three stages, each characterized by a different
form of marriage.
• Gender inequality originated during the third
stage, when an inheritable economic surplus
first arose due to technological development and
the institution of private property. Men overthrew
the traditional matrilineal system to ensure that
their sons would inherit .
• During this stage household work became
private service, and women were excluded from
social production and became legally
subordinated to men.
• The solution to gender equality is the abolition of
capitalism, which would eliminate concerns
about inheritance and return women to ‘public
industry’.
• Marxists: Gender inequalities were the
byproduct of social inequality and
replacement of capitalism with socialism
would automatically resolve women’s
problems.
• Max Weber, under influence of his activist
mother and wife, supported the liberal branch of
the women’s rights movement.
• In ‘General economic history’ he refined
Engels’ theory in describing the transition from
matriarchal tribes to patriarchal agrarian
societies, a process by which the gender division
of labor within the family increased and the
status of women declined.
• Weber argued that this transition was not simply
a function of economic change, but also reflected
alterations in the military, religion and magic.
• He understood that the process of societal
rationalization, a central theme in Weber’s
work, was a masculine phenomenon. However,
Weber’s essay on social inequality ‘Class,
status and party’ was ‘silent’ about gender.
• The founding ‘fathers’ of Sociology viewed
women as mothers and wives, as a part of the
family rather as actors in the world of economy
and politics.
• They had accepted that the gender division of
labour which they observed in families in a
capitalist industrial society was in some way
natural and therefore unworthy to study.
• Even Engels, who incorporated Morgan’s
etnografic evidence in his discussion of the
emergence of women’s subordination, assumed
a natural basis for the division of labour between
women and men.
• Male-dominated social structures/institutions
were implicitly defined as if they were gender
neutral.
• Sociology is a multiple-paradigm science; that is, it
comprises a number of competing paradigms.
• At any given time, however, one paradigm tends to
dominate in the discipline.
• For much of sociology’s recent past – especially from the
1940s to the 1960s – the dominant paradigm was
structural functionalism.
• The structural functionalist perspective has been
particularly influential in the study of gender
• In their analysis of gender, structural functionalists begin
with the observation that women and men are
physically different. Of special significance are the
facts that men tend to be bigger and stronger than
women and that women bear and nurse children.
• According to functionalists, these biological
differences have led to the emergence of different
gender roles.
• More specifically, a social role, not unlike a theatrical
role, includes a set of behavioral requirements or
expectations that the person who occupies the role is
supposed to play.
• The concept of gender roles refers to the behaviors that
are prescribed for a society’s members depending on
their sex.
• Functionalists maintain that for much of human history,
women’s reproductive role has dictated that their gender
role be a domestic one.
• Given that women bear and nurse children, it makes
sense for them to remain at home to rear the. It then
follows that if women are at home caring for children,
they will assume other domestic duties as well.
• In contrast, men’s biology better suits them for the role of
economic provider and protection of the family.
• Functionalists point out that the work women do in the
home is functional.
• Women in many ways reproduce society - by giving
birth to new members, by teaching or socializing them to
accept the culture’s agreed upon values and norms, and
by providing men and children with affection and
physical sustenance.
• But functionalists devalue traditional women’s work,
referring to it as a ‘duty’ and designating men the role of
leaders in the family.
Two central themes of functionalism:
1. Emphasis on gender differences as natural
phenomena deriving from human biology.
Feminist critique:
• Portraying masculinity and femininity as natural
it does not consider that what constitutes
masculinity and femininity varies tremendously
throughout history and across cultures.
• It may be the case that biological factors are
responsible for many of personality and
behavior differences that we may observe
between women and men. However, this does
not mean that one sex or gender is better that
the other or that members of one sex deserve
a disproportionate share of society’s resources
and rewards.
2. The conception of gender in terms of roles.
Feminist critique:
• The notion of role focuses attention more on individuals
than on social structure, and implies that ‘female role’
and ‘male role’ are complementary (i.e. separate or
different, but equal). These terms neglect question of
power and conflict. It is significant that sociologists do
not speak of ‘class roles’ or ‘race roles’.
• A key concept in this critique is power. The most
powerful members of a society are usually those who
control the largest share of societal resources, such as
money, property. In hierarchically structured societies
such as our own these resources may be distributed
unequally on the basis of characteristics over which
individuals have no control, e.g., sex or age.
• In overlooking the issue of power relations, the structural
functionalist perspective neglects significant dimensions
of gender; the causes of gender-based inequality and it’s
consequences for women and men.
• During the 1960s , structural functionalism
began to lose its status as dominant
sociological paradigm.
• The 1960s was a period of social protest
and activism, the sociologists began to
question the accuracy of describing
society and harmonious social system.
• There emerged a number of different
paradigms.
• Particularly important to the sociological
study of gender has been development of
the feminist paradigm.
Feminist critiques of [malestream, conventional]
sociology
• Most sociological studies were conducted by men, using
male subjects, although findings were generalized to all
people [research findings were based on male samples
and generalized to the whole of the population]. : ‘Most
of what we have formerly known as the study of society
is only the male study of male society’.
• Areas and issues of concern to women are frequently
overlooked and seen as unimportant. Women’s roles
were seen as natural and therefore not investigated.
Sociology’s tools, concepts and theories have been
developed to investigate the public world of men.
Feminist critiques of [malestream, conventional]
sociology
• When women are included in research they are
presented in a distorted and sexist way. When women
were studied, their behavior and attitudes were analyzed
in terms of male standard of normalcy or rightness.
• Gender was considered an important category of
analysis only in a limited number of sociological
subfields, such as marriage and family, whereas in all
others (e.g., sociology of work, organizations, etc.) it was
ignored.
Feminist critiques of [malestream, conventional]
sociology
Sociology is seen, at best, sex-blind and at worst sexist:
• That is, there is, at best, no recognition that women’s structural
position and experiences are not the same as men’s and that a sex
is therefore and important explanatory variable, and, at worst,
women’s experiences are ignored. The ways in which men
dominate and subordinate women are either ignored or seen as
natural.
Anne Oakley (http://www.annoakley.co.uk/ ) has suggested
that there are these explanations for the sexism in sociology:
• Sociology as a discipline developed in the 19th century, and the
sociologists were concerned with understanding political and
economic changes, capitalist society and it’s class relationships.
Sociologists concentrated on the public sphere and ignored the
private sphere of the home. Sociology has ignored not just women,
but the whole private sphere.
• Historically, sexism in sociology has been
in large part a result of the relatively low
numbers of women at academic and
research institutions - Sociology was
predominantly male profession.
• It also reflects a broader social prejudice
against women, which is embodied in the
assumption that what women do, or think,
or say is unimportant or uninteresting.
A sociology for women
How to feel the gaps in existing theory
and research in sociology?
There have been three broad responses
given by feminists:
• Integration.
• Separatism.
• Reconceptualization.
Integration
The task to reform existing ideas and
practices in sociology, to bring women in
and thereby to fill in the existing gaps in
knowledge.
The major problems:
• Women are likely to continue to be marginalized.
• Malestream ideas (e.g., assumptions about the
division between the public and domestic, about
the primacy of paid work, etc.) will remain
unchallenged.
Separatism
• What is needed is a sociology for women by
women (development by women of specific
sociological knowledge about women).
• Gender is seen as the primary division in
society; all women share the common position
because they are dominated by men.
The major problems:
• By ignoring men, important aspects of women’s
social reality would be ignored, including the
analysis of women’s oppression.
• Malestream sociology will continue to ignore
women.
Reconceptualization
• What is needed is a total and radical
reformulation of sociology so that it is able to
incorporate women adequately.
• It is necessary to reconceptualize sociological
theories - revolution, not reforms, is
necessary.
The major problems:
• Many malestream sociologists are resistant to
the view that there is a need for a revolution.
Thank you for attention!