Class, Race, and Gender
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Structured Inequalities
Class, race, and gender organize society as a whole and create a variety of contexts for family living
through their unequal distribution of social opportunities.
They are forms of stratification that foster group-based inequalities.
They distribute social resources and opportunities differently.
• Life chances
They are relational systems of power and subordination.
They are interconnected systems of inequality.
• Matrix of domination
Families can be a place to resist inequality
Social stratification: structured (socially patterned) inequality
• Groups are socially defined & treated unequally
Class
Persons occupying the same relative economic rank form a social class.
• Striking differences in income; growing gap between top 1/5 & bottom 1/5
• Occupation is the most frequently used indicator of class.
• Determines income, opportunity, lifestyle
Cultural explanations of class
• Each class is viewed as having a distinctive culture.
• Comparisons between the classes usually turn out to be “deficit” accounts of lower-status families.
• Culture of poverty, underclass
Cultural explanations obscure or ignore the social and material realities of class.
• Rodman: “lower class family traits” are actually solutions to problems faced by lower class people
• Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID): families experience short-term spells of poverty as result of
dramatic changes (divorce, sudden unemployment, serious illness)
Structural Explanations of Class
• Examine the ways in which social class shapes the networks of relationships between families,
individuals, and institutions.
• Focus on relationships of power between class groups
• The key to social class is not occupation, but the control one has in one’s work, the work of others,
decision making, & investments.
• Different connections with society’s opportunity structure produce & require unique family adaptations
• Class privileges (advantages, prerogatives, options available to middle & upper classes) shape
family relationships
• Class structure organizes families differently
• Poverty, wage earning, affluent salaries, & inherited wealth create different material advantages,
differences in the amount of control over others, and class differences in how families are shaped &
how they operate
• Gender cuts across class & race racial divisions
Class-Based Family Differences
Families in Poverty (Lower Class)
• Lack of opportunities make nuclear family difficult to sustain: poor are more likely to expand family
boundaries, use larger network of kin than nonpoor
• Poverty reduces the likelihood of marriage: undermines the availability of economically secure partners
Blue-Collar Families (Working Class)
• Largest single group of families
• Economic changes, increased vulnerability move these families farther from idealized nuclear family
model: pioneers of contemporary family patterns
• Interact more with kin than middle class families do
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Middle Class Families
• Idealized family form
• Many sustain middle class status through wives’ employment
• Able to rely on non-familial institutions (rather than kin) such as medical coverage, credit at banks
• Families of Professionals (Upper Middle Class)
• Likely to merge spheres of work & family: leisure activities revolve around occupational concerns &
associates, family life often subordinate to husband-father’s occupation
• Autonomy of nuclear family is strengthened by economic resources & built-in ties with supportive
institutions
• Wealthy Families (Upper Class)
• Economic power based on wealth (not income) provides opportunities not available to other families:
ability to generate additional resources
• Family lifestyles made possible by control over labor of others
• Family boundaries are more open than those of middle class: includes extended family, kin-based family
form serves to preserve inherited wealth
• Class boundaries are more rigidly drawn: marriage market restricted to small (but national) pool of
eligible partners linked by exclusive schools, colleges, clubs, resorts
• Marriage is more than legal-emotional commitment; it is a means for concentrating capital &
maintaining in-group solidarity
• Gendered division of labor maintains class solidarity: women’s philanthropic work serves “gatekeeping” function, preserves institutions that benefit family & class
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Race
Race is a socially defined reality, not a biological reality.
• DNA evidence from Human Genome Project
Racial categories are the basis for allocating social resources & differential distribution of power, privilege,
and prestige.
Racial formation: society is continually creating & transforming racial categories (Mexican American >
Hispanic, Japanese American > Asian American)
Race is used for socially identifying groups based on physical differences
Ethnicity identifies distinctive national origin, language, religion, culture (social differences)
Racial-ethnic groups are socially subordinated & remain culturally distinct within the U.S.
Macro Structural Inequalities and Racial-Ethnic Families
Racial stratification produces different opportunity structures that shape families in a variety of ways.
• Segregation, employment problems, poverty are barriers to family well-being & family formation which
result in racial-ethnic family arrangements (& even their definitions of what families are) which differ
from the idealized family
• Extended kinship systems, “fictive kin”, & informal support networks spread across multiple households
are produced by racial & economic conditions that fail to meet family needs
Racism results in limited economic resources and inferior living conditions for many racial-ethnic families.
• Great disparity in income level have persisted over time
• Even wider gap in wealth
• Poverty rate for African American & Latino families 3x that of White families
African American Families
Over the last 40 years, increases in female-headed households, marital disruptions, out-of-wedlock births,
& % of children living in poverty have resulted in African American families being less conventional &
more diverse in their structure & composition than White families
Social, demographic, and economic factors underlie the lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates of
blacks.
• Gender ratio: women outnumber men in the 20-49 age range
• High unemployment, low wages & little job security for men
• Economic conditions make marriage less important than kinship
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Blacks are more likely than whites to reside in extended family households.
• “Othermothers”
Underclass debate
• Single parent families are the cause of poverty vs. single parent families are the consequence of
economic deprivation
• Two parent family is no guarantee against poverty for minorities
Latino Families
Poverty rates for Hispanics have risen in the past decade.
• Highest among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans
• Causes of poverty across Latino communities differ
Extended kinship systems in Chicano families
• Familism refers to an obligation to, and an orientation toward, one’s nuclear and extended families.
• Develops as a strategy for surviving difficult economic circumstances
• Four components: demographic, structural, normative, behavioral
• Compadrazgo system includes two sets of “fictive kin”
• Among immigrants, family extension is a classic adaptation
• Mexican extended families in U.S. become stronger & more extensive through successive generations
& socioeconomic mobility
Human Agency and Family Formation
People of color have acclimated to difficult circumstances by adapting their household structures
(compadrazgo, othermothers, household augmentation).
Gender
Gender, like race and class, is a basic organizing principle of society.
• Social & cultural definitions of masculinity & femininity are the basis for treating men & women
differently: dividing labor, assigning roles, allocating social rewards
Gender system denies both women and men the full range of human & social possibilities
Two Ways of Thinking about Gender
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The Traditional Gender Roles Approach
• Biology, history, and the needs of society naturally separate women and men into distinctive roles.
• Gender inequality is a consequence of behavior learned by individual women & men.
• This perspective ignores what is most important about roles—that they are unequal in power,
resources, and opportunities.
• The Family as a Gendered Institution
• The gendered institution perspective holds that gender is a factor in the assumptions, practices, and
power dynamics of U.S. institutions.
• Patriarchy (forms of social organization in which men are dominant over women) shapes families along
with other social institutions.
• Private, public, capitalist patriarchy
• Structured gender inequality interacts with other inequalities such as race, class, & sexuality to sort
women & men differently.
• These inequalities also work together to produce differences among women & differences among
men
• In general, men gain privileges at the expense of women
• Domestic division of labor (kind & amount of work done in the home) limits women’s occupational
opportunities