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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book is an important introductory textbook on sexual politics and an original contribution to the reformulation of social and political theory. In a discussion of, among other issues, psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminist theories, the structure of gender relations, and working class feminism, Connell has produced a major work of synthesis and scholarship which will be of unique value to students and professionals in sociology, politics, women's studies and to anyone interested in the field of sexual politics.
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Seitenzahl: 629
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Copyright © R. W. Connell 1987
The right of R. W. Connell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1987 by Polity Press in association with BlackwellPublishers Ltd.Reprinted in 1991, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998
Transferred to Digital print 2003
Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-7456-6527-6 (Multi-user ebook)
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11 on 12 pt Baskerville by Photo-graphics, Honiton, Devon
Printed and bound in Great Britain byMarston Lindsay Ross International Ltd,Oxfordshire
By the same author
Staking a Claim: Feminism, bureaucracy and the state (1989), with S. Franzway and D. Court
Teachers’ Work (1985)
Which Way Is Up? Essays on sex, class and culture (1983)
Making the Difference: Schools, families and social division (1982), with D. J. Ashenden, S. Kessler and G. W. Dowsett
Ockers and Disco-Maniacs: Sex, gender and secondary schooling (1982), with S. Kessler, D. J. Ashenden and G. W. Dowsett
Class Structure in Australian History (1980), with T. H. Irving
Socialism and Labor (1978)
Ruling Class, Ruling Culture: Studies of conflict, power and hegemony in Australian life (1977)
Twelve to Twenty: A study of teenagers in Sydney (1975), with W. F. Connell, R. E. Stroobant, K. E. Sinclair and K. W. Rogers
The Child’s Construction of Politics (1971)
Politics of the Extreme Right: Warringah 1966 (1967), with F. Gould
Preface
1 Introduction: Some Facts in the Case
A teenager and her family
The public world: wages, education, jobs
Violence, prejudice, the state
Part I: Theorizing Gender
2 Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory
Secular morality
Science and radicalism
Sex roles and syntheses
Feminism and gay liberation
Reaction and paradox
3 Current Frameworks
Extrinsic theories: from ‘class first’ through ‘social reproduction’ to ‘dual systems’
Sex role theory
Categorical theory
Towards a practice-based theory
4 The Body and Social Practice
The knot of natural difference
Transcendence and negation
Practical transformations of the body
Part II: The Structure of Gender Relations
5 Main Structures: Labour, Power, Cathexis
Structure and structural analysis
Labour
Power
Cathexis
A note on ‘system’ and composition
6 Gender Regimes and the Gender Order
Institutions
The family
The state
The street
The gender order
A note on the definition and institutionalization of gender
7 Historical Dynamic
Historicity and ‘origins’
The course of history
Crisis tendencies
Part III: Femininity and Masculinity
8 Sexual Character
Unitary models and sex difference research
Masculinity/femininity scales
Multiple models: from typology to relationship
The effect of structures
Hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity
9 The Mystery in Broad Daylight: Gender Formation and Psychoanalysis
Socialization
Classical psychoanalysis: the dynamic unconscious
Existential psychoanalysis: the project
10 Personality as Practice
Personality, society and life history
The historical dynamic in personality
Politics of personality
Part IV: Sexual Politics
11 Sexual Ideology
Discourse and practice
Ideological processes
Cultural dynamics
Ideologists and interests
12 Political Practice
The scope of sexual politics
The articulation of interests
Working-class feminism
Liberation movements: birth and transformation
13 Present and Future
The present moment
Strategies
Concluding notes on the world to which a social theory of gender might lead
Bibliography
Index
The radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s opened debates about a range of practical issues to do with sex and gender, ranging from sexual expression to economic inequality, police violence against gays, and rape. Naming these issues, the new feminist and gay politics also posed theoretical questions and began to grow a theoretical language: ‘sexual politics’, ‘oppression’, ‘patriarchy’.
By the mid 1970s when these terms were common currency, it was clear to anyone willing to listen that women’s liberation and gay liberation required a profound change in our ways of understanding society. Sexual politics brought to light patterns of power, interest and conflict which made little sense in terms of socialist class analysis, conventional economics, political science pluralism or sociological functionalism. A theoretical revolution in the social sciences was called for.
This has been slow in coming. It was not clear what kind of theory would be adequate to understand the world of sexual politics. Attempts were made to adapt existing ideas. A quiet academic backwater, ‘sex role’ research, suddenly found itself enormously popular and influential. Biology was roped in to explain matters the biologists themselves hardly dreamed of. Rival schools of thought emerged within feminism, debating the universality of patriarchy, the usefulness of psychoanalysis, the impact of capitalism, the significance of men’s sexual violence. Theorists of gay liberation searched for inspiration through psychoanalysis, Marxism, anticolonialism and the emerging theories of discourse. By the early 1980s one influential school of feminism was abandoning the basic theoretical assumption of ten years before, the fundamentally social character of gender.
This book is an attempt to resolve some of the difficulties raised by these controversies and to propose the outline of a systematic social theory of gender. That is a generous ambition and one person’s work can only be a fragment of the enterprise. But given the state of the problem it seemed timely to try out a large synthesis, to suggest how the different issues about gender might fit together. The argument, accordingly, ranges over a very wide field and the research has led me into some unexpected corners – from the archaeology of ancient south-west Asia (trying to get some grip on the evidence for feminist ‘origins’ arguments) to the lesser-known followers of Freud. It is inevitable that some parts of the analysis are thin, and some are relatively abstract or speculative. When there was a choice I put more time into problems that seemed relatively neglected, such as the institutionalization of gender, than into issues now widely studied, such as sexual ideology.
The basis of the synthesis, the logical starting-point, is the nature of social reality itself. Arguments about gender are plagued by an assumption that what is biological or ‘natural’ is somehow more real than what is social. For instance it was often suggested in the early 1970s that sex roles were ‘artificial’ because they were socially created (by media, schools or whatever). There was a sense that if you poked a finger at them it would go right through. Since then a good many fingers have been poked and they did not go through. Sexist stereotypes are still with us, showing impressive toughness and resilience. Social process has its own power to constrain, its own resistance to dissolution. And yet it is entirely human. The oppression of women and gays is a matter of human agency, not of nature.
How to get a good understanding of these qualities has been a central issue in social theory over the last thirty years, and an uncommonly difficult one. The debates around structuralism in the 1970s got badly hung up on a contradiction between the impersonality and the humanness of social process. There is, however, an approach emerging in social theory that has a more convincing answer, though it is still not widely known outside a technical readership. One of its sources is the theory of practice derived by philosophical critiques of mainstream Marxism; another is the dualist or recursive models of the relation between structure and practice developed in theoretical sociology; and a third is the contextual analysis of the self, personal action and intersubjectivity developing in social psychology.
There is no commonly accepted term for this approach; I will call it the ‘theory of practice’ for short. It seems to me consistent with the best current research on gender and sexual politics, and to offer resolutions of some of the dilemmas the theory of gender has run into. Accordingly the general approach of the book is to bring together the theory of practice with the problems of sexual politics. This is far from being a one-way trade, an ‘application’; it has involved reformulations of both. One of the unexpected outcomes was a demand for a practice-based approach to personality, which grew equally from a general principle of historicity, the findings of psychoanalysis and the experience of sexual liberation movements.
The reasons for undertaking the enterprise were partly that I wanted to understand the problems myself and partly that theory is important, at least in the long run, for practical politics. Bad theories will do harm. There are enough dilemmas and strategic conflicts in sexual politics to make a decent theory of gender a tangible asset for progressive politics of many kinds.
But theories don’t grow on trees; theorizing is itself a social practice with a politics. Most of the radical theorizing of gender has been done by women or by gay men. I am a heterosexual man, married, middle-aged, with a tenured academic job in an affluent country – in world terms one of the very rich and secure. I owe an account of what I am doing here.
There is a view put by the 1970s ‘men’s movement’ in the United States that ‘men are equally oppressed’. This claim is demonstrably false. Some of the relevant evidence is set out below in chapter 1, which is intended as an introduction to the facts of gender inequality for those not already familiar with the issue.
Men in general are advantaged by current social structure, heterosexual men more so than others. What the debate about ‘men’s liberation’ nevertheless showed is that there are costs for men in their social advantages, sometimes serious ones. It also showed that there are some groups of men who can recognize injustice when they see it and are far from comfortable with the position they have inherited.
For me, this discontent had several sources. I have been uneasy with conventional masculinity almost as long as I can remember, certainly since I was a teenager. I am not sure why; there may be an answer in what Dorothy Dinnerstein says in The Mermaid and the Minotaur about the men who became student activists in the 1960s. At all events my attachment to masculinity was sufficiently fractured to make me sit up and take notice when the women of that generation mobilized in their own liberation movement. I read books like Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex as well as those of the ‘Freudian Left’ and listened to a great deal of discussion about feminist principles and programs. A commitment to a socialism that stressed the theme of equality rather than textbook Marxism was probably important. Certainly important was the fact of living with a woman who was working on projects like setting up a women’s health centre, and the fact of working in university departments alongside people engaged in feminist research.
I became convinced fairly early that the main feminist arguments about inequality and oppression were right. Somewhat later, I became convinced that they required a thoroughgoing reconstruction of socialist politics and the social sciences. Later again, that gay liberation raised crucial theoretical questions that were part of the same set of issues. Finally, that this was also the business of heterosexual men, who have some specific jobs to do (e.g. in the politics of masculinity) but also ought to be involved in the general analysis of sexual politics.
That is not necessarily easy to do. On the one hand men’s settled ways of thinking have to be disrupted. The slow progress in getting issues of gender recognized in the mainstream of academic disciplines like history, economics or psychology, long dominated by men, illustrates the resistance. On the other hand there are currents in feminist thought which do not welcome men’s involvement, and there is a fine line to tread between intruding on women’s business and sharing the work on common problems. Even sympathetic men writing about feminism have attracted some pretty fierce responses. I do things in this book that a purist might not do, such as discussing the strategies of feminist movements. The reason is that no one of either sex can make an extended analysis of sexual politics without touching on these issues.
The number of heterosexual men working on these issues is still small. I don’t think there is anything in itself admirable about being a dissident. I look forward to the day when a majority of men, as well as a majority of women, accept the absolute equality of the sexes, accept sharing of childcare and all other forms of work, accept freedom of sexual behaviour, and accept multiplicity of gender forms, as being plain common sense and the ordinary basis of civilized life.
If the number of people working to turn these principles into practice is to grow into settled majorities, there have to be good reasons why people will accept them as principles. These reasons need not all be the same. Sexual politics, like politics in other fields, is a matter of constructing coalitions. For some groups the reasons flow straightforwardly from a collective interest in change. The catch is always with heterosexual men, whose collective interest – as the evidence through the book confirms – is broadly to maintain the existing system. What reasons for change have enough weight, against this entrenched interest, to detach heterosexual men from the defence of patriarchy? There are, in my experience, five.
(1) Even the beneficiaries of an oppressive system can come to see its oppressiveness, especially the way it poisons areas of life they share.
(2) Heterosexual men are often committed in important ways to women – their wives and lovers, mothers and sisters, daughters and nieces, co-workers – and may desire better lives for them. Especially they may see the point of creating more civilized and peaceable sexual arrangements for their children, even at the cost of their own privileges.
(3) Heterosexual men are not all the same or all united, and many do suffer some injury from the present system. The oppression of gays, for instance, has a back-wash damaging to effeminate or unassertive heterosexuals.
(4) Change in gender relations is happening anyway, and on a large scale. A good many heterosexual men recognize that they cannot cling to the past and want some new directions.
(5) Heterosexual men are not excluded from the basic human capacity to share experiences, feelings and hopes. This ability is often blunted, but the capacity for caring and identification is not necessarily killed. The question is what circumstances might call it out. Being a father often does; some political movements, notably the environmental and peace movements, seem to; sexual politics may do so too.
These are, at least, among the reasons for this book. It is also motivated by personal experience. Over the last fifteen years I have tried to work through issues of sexual politics with other people in my household, my workplaces and the labour movement. Some of this has been very difficult indeed and has convinced me, as no theoretical writing could, of the sheer intractability of gender relations. It has also convinced me that relationships and customary practices do change, that collective projects of reconstruction are possible, and that oppositions of interest can be worked on and sometimes worked through, within such projects.
If social research is to have major value for that enterprise, it must do something more than show where we have come from or describe where we are now – useful as those jobs are. It must also concern itself with strategic issues: with where it is possible to go and how it is possible to get there. It is easy to speculate on these matters, difficult to produce well-founded arguments. Much of the literature on gender cannot do this job because of the way its theory is constructed. It has been one of my main aims to develop forms of analysis that are credible as social theory and which also key in to strategic argument. This is behind the following analyses of interest articulation in sexual politics, crisis tendencies at the level of the whole society, and the means of reconstructing personality ‘from below’. A social theory should also help to formulate the general goals of politics. I think the kind of theory developed here can do this, and the book ends with a discussion of what the ultimate outcomes of progressive sexual politics might be.
This book is the product of ten years’ work, not all of which has proceeded smoothly in one direction. My first attempt to get the issues together was an unpublished essay of 1976 called ‘Another Coup d’Etat Among Men’ (Robin Morgan’s joke about socialist revolutions), which sketched a theory of ‘hegemonic sexuality’ as a meeting-ground for socialism and feminism. About that time I began work with Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett on a study of social inequality in secondary schooling, eventually published as Making the Difference and Ockers and Disco-Maniacs. We started with class inequality but developed an interest in gender and sexuality among teenagers. The interviews and case studies from this project have been important in my thinking ever since and are discussed at several points in this book. How femininity and masculinity are realized among adults, especially in the workplace, became a major theme in the study of teachers that grew out of the same project, Teachers’ Work. In 1979 I began very hesitantly to work on issues of masculinity, attempting a self-analysis à la Karen Horney and writing about the politics of my own relationships and experience of the body. Less hesitantly I began a series of essays on the theory of patriarchy and how to connect it with socialist theory. The few publishable products of these two enterprises were collected in Which Way is Up? from which the idea of this book developed. The detailed studies in that book on the concept of social reproduction, Sartre’s theory of practice, the connection of patriarchy and capitalism and the nature of role theory, underlie parts of the argument here, as indicated in the notes. In the 1980s the work on masculinity turned into two new projects. One was a theoretical study, done with Tim Carrigan and John Lee and published as ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, which reworked social-scientific studies of masculinity in the light of gay liberation, psychoanalysis and feminism. The other is an empirical study of changes in contemporary masculinity, done jointly with Pip Martin and Norm Radican, which is still in the field. These two projects underlie a good deal of the discussion of personality in Part III.
My work on these issues has been strongly influenced by the work of other people at Macquarie University. Rosemary Pringle’s work on sexuality, on gender and capitalism, and the industry studies that became Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle’s Gender at Work, have been a constant point of reference. Sue Kippax introduced me to the new social psychology; Sheila Shaver to the intersections of gender with welfare policy. I have learnt a great deal from several doctoral students with whom I have worked as supervisor: Teresa Brennan, who introduced me to feminist psychoanalysis; Clare Burton, whose book Subordination develops a detailed critique of socialist-feminist thought; Tim Carrigan’s work on gay liberation theory; Carol O’Donnell’s work on labour markets in The Basis of the Bargain; and the late Di Court, whose work on feminism and the state highlighted the problem of the central structures of power. The continued interest of several generations of undergraduate students has been both a stimulus to do the work and a test of what was produced.
The final stages were made possible by research assistance from Thea Welsh, who is responsible for much of the detail in chapter 1, and Pip Martin, on questions ranging from the membership of the Soviet Communist Party to the recent history of Sydney theatre.
Many people have given feedback to working papers and drafts. I have been helped particularly by comments from Glynn Huilgol, Elizabeth Reid and Hester Eisenstein. Gary Dowsett, Lynne Segal, Rosemary Pringle, John Iremonger and Venetia Nelson read and criticized the whole manuscript. The bulk of the typing in the last few years has been done by Helen Easson, as it was in earlier stages by Heather Williams; the project would not have moved without their skill and critical interest. And I am deeply grateful for the tolerance and friendship of Robyn Dasey, in whose house the whole first draft was written.
Part of the work for this book was funded by the Australian Research Grants Committee with a grant for a study called ‘Theory of Class and Patriarchy’. Grants for purely theoretical work are sufficiently rare that this should perhaps be celebrated. Part has been funded by Macquarie University Research Grants and by two periods of study leave from Macquarie University.
My greatest debt by far is to Pam Benton, who has been involved with the project through its whole development and at all its levels – intellectual, practical and emotional. I would like to dedicate the product to our daughter Kylie, in the hope that we can get enough right in this generation to make the world she grows up in a more equal, safe and rational place: less patriarchal and more human.
The plan of the book is straightforward: an introductory sketch of the facts of gender inequalities; three chapters on theories of gender; three chapters on gender as social structure; three chapters on gender as personality; and three chapters on politics and ideology. This plan, however, risks exaggerating the separateness of the parts. A central theoretical idea is that the social and the personal depend on each other and in an earlier draft of the book the chapters on personality came before the chapters on social structure. I would emphasize that Parts II and III should each be read in the light of the other.
Referencing is a problem with a complex and wide-ranging text, so I have invented my own (condensed) version of the Harvard system. The names of authors are mentioned in the text without dates and the details can be found in the alphabetical bibliography at the back. Any ambiguity about which work of a particular author is cited is explained in the bibliographical notes at the end of each chapter, which are compiled section by section. Here also are references which would have been awkward to include in the main text and discussions of some technicalities which would have interrupted the flow of argument. These notes refer, as in the conventional Harvard system, to the bibliography; with the exception of the notes to chapter 1, which give directly the sources of statistical data used in that chapter alone.
NOTES
For an example of the trouble a man can get into when writing about feminism, see the criticisms of David Bouchier’s The Feminist Challenge by Janet Bujra and others (1984). For the gender dimension of our educational research see Kessler, Ashenden, Connell and Dowsett (1982, 1985).
This chapter attempts to show why a social analysis of gender is needed for a comprehension of personal life, politics and society as a whole. It makes out a prima-facie case for the enterprise. Accordingly the facts are set out here with little commentary. Their interpretation is provided by the rest of the book.
The first part of the chapter takes one person – an Australian teenager called Delia Prince – as a point of departure and explores how her circumstances and choices are shaped in terms of sex and gender. Delia has not been chosen to represent a particular ‘type’; the point is, rather, that the same kind of analysis would be needed to understand any individual life. The second part of the chapter looks at the collectivities Delia lives in: city, state, country, world. Here I discuss some of the statistical and institutional evidence about sex inequality and sexual politics. This too is illustrative. The topic is vast and only a fragment of the evidence can be recited in a single chapter. But it is perhaps enough to demonstrate the scale and importance of the issues.
A Teenager and her Family
Delia Prince (the name is a pseudonym) is one of the teenagers my colleagues and I interviewed in 1978, along with their parents and teachers, in the research project later published as Making the Difference. The research was an attempt to understand the circumstances, in school, family and workplace, that lay behind the massively greater drop-out rate from working-class high schools compared with ruling-class secondary colleges.
Delia was one of a sample of students from a working-class outer suburb, where she lives with her two parents, older sister and older brother. Like a large proportion of the Australian working class the family owns its own house, a comfortable brick-veneer one, set back behind a high fence. The house was built mainly by Delia’s father and a great deal of her mother’s energy over the years has gone into keeping its interior gleaming and its garden attractive.
Delia, fifteen at the time we interviewed her, is a cheerful if rather quiet person, past puberty, and already equipped with a steady boyfriend. From her parents’ point of view she is doing well, especially as she has come through some serious medical problems and periods in hospital. She ‘chatters’ with her mother in the kitchen about what goes on at school, does her share of housework without much grumbling and, unlike many of her peers who sneak out at night, observes the family rules about when she can go out. ‘Basically just a normal kid’ is her mother’s summary. Certainly Delia seems everyone’s picture of a nice girl.
She loves animals and so would like to become a vet. That is, if she gets good enough marks at school; otherwise she will try for a clerical job in a bank. Her school test results at present are no better than moderate; she is having trouble with maths. She gets along easily with most of her teachers, though there are a couple she has disliked. From their point of view she is not very visible – not a problem, not a star. Apart from her parents’ wishes and her own vague ambition to be a veterinarian, there is nothing much to attach her to the school. She confesses that she would prefer to leave this year, though she expects to go on to the School Certificate assessment and leave at sixteen.
‘Just a normal kid’, yes; but where does that ‘normality’ come from? How is it produced? And isn’t there a little too much of it? If we push back behind the somewhat bland appearance of Delia’s adolescence, some more complex and tension-laden processes might come into view.
To start with the economic circumstances of Delia’s life, Fred Prince, her father, is a tradesman with a certified skill. He does not use this trade in his current job working for a public authority as leading hand in maintenance, in charge of a gang of five men. He left his trade a good many years ago to cash in on the television boom, setting up a small business installing aerials. Working very long hours he made enough money to buy a block of land and starting building a house. He eventually gave that job up because it kept him away from the family too much, and went back to work for wages. Rae, Delia’s mother, also has a paid job. She is clerk, typist and office dogsbody for a small business selling motor parts. As a young woman in the late 1950s she started clerical work in a bank but was dismissed, as a matter of bank routine, when she married. She took other jobs and kept up paid work even when the children came along, in order to finance the house. Her current job is (theoretically) part time. She does the family’s cooking and cleaning, washing, ironing and most of the childcare.
While there is a strong element of ‘tradition’ in this arrangement, it is also economically rational for the Princes to organize their employment this way. The base rate of pay in Fred’s occupation is $10 a week more than in Rae’s, and actual earnings differ much more than that because of overtime and various penalty rates. Equally important in a recession, Fred’s job is much more secure. He is a member of a strong, though not exceptionally militant, trade union, run by men with experience much like his own, which has established virtually lifetime tenure for jobs at his level. Rae is covered by a union also run by men (though about two-thirds of its members are women). As it happens, this is a union dominated by conservative Catholic men who are not very keen about women being permanent members of the work-force at all. It has not established any rights of tenure or redundancy entitlements in jobs like hers.
When I first arrived at their house to arrange the interviews, Fred came to meet me with his hands covered with oil. He had been stripping down his lawnmower which had broken down because he was trying to mow wet grass in time for a christening party. Rae was inside the house cooking for the party. As this illustrates, Delia is growing up among clear-cut definitions of what is men’s work and what is women’s, at home as in the workplace. The sense of what work is appropriate for a woman feeds into Delia’s ideas of possible futures. This is evident in her sex-typed interest in animals, and her idea of an alternative as a bank clerk, which is modelled directly on her mother’s work history.
Despite a formal commitment to ‘equal opportunity’, her schooling does little in practice to change these ideas about work and the assumptions about marriage to which they are closely tied. Most of Delia’s female friends and peers expect to get married fairly young and have children quite soon. So does she; she can even name the age – twenty – at which she expects to get married. There are some feminist teachers at her school who have different notions of what women might aim for. But as their ideas centre on ‘careers’ for women and advancement through higher education, they only make much sense to the girls in the ‘A’ stream – who are the only ones, in a working-class school, likely to have any chance of going to college or university. Delia is not one of them.
Yet Delia’s future is not being constructed in a closed system. There are changes going on, even in small details. Her mother Rae, for instance, has taught Delia’s brother, as well as the two girls, to cook. On larger issues there is significant tension, even contradiction. Rae herself had done well at school and was obliged to leave before she wanted to, to help her widowed mother. She had wanted to become a nurse but her boyfriend (Fred) did not like the idea, so she gave it up. Her mild comment, ‘it’s my only regret now’, is the nearest she gets in the interview to expressing anger against Fred.
Even more striking is the fact that Rae kept a job when the children were young. This was for a ‘good’ reason, to pay for the house, but still violated an almost universal Australian doctrine that mothers should stay home with their pre-school children – a doctrine duly recited and endorsed by Delia. Rae was defensive and ‘guilty’ (her word) about this and has probably come in for a lot of criticism from relatives. She seems to have tried to compensate by being the perfect wife-and-mother ever since. One result is overload, doing a full-time job at home and a nearly full-time job at work. At thirty-eight she already looks worn and her manner is a little stressed and abrupt. Even Delia, with perception unusual in a fifteen year old, thinks that the job is good for Rae but that she is working too hard.
Both Rae and Fred have a clear idea of what a good family is. Both have sacrificed something in their own lives to make it possible and both have invested a lot of emotion and energy in trying to produce it. Delia, the youngest child, is now the focus of that process. Where Rae’s mother had never spoken of sex, Rae and Fred have organized ‘round-table sex talks’ with their children. They have tried to be more humane than their own parents without losing control of the kids. They closely monitor what is going on in the teenage peer groups. Fred heard rumours of ‘sex, drugs, playing up in toilets’ at the school, so he went and challenged the teachers about it, to be reassured that Delia and her sister were not involved. Earlier this year Rae leant that Delia was in a group that smoked and got drunk at weekends; she exerted herself, successfully, to separate Delia from them. Yet Fred and Rae are not opposed to Delia having an active social life. The boyfriend is not only approved of, but, astonishingly, he seems to have been chosen by the parents. At least they introduced him to Delia.
Behind this constant management of the children is a structure of authority that makes Fred, very definitely, the ‘head of the household’ and Rae the second-in-command. He is self-confident in public, she is not. He contrasts his own behaviour with that of his father, ‘a hard man’ (read: violent) who would belt even an eighteen year old for bad manners at table. Fred reports with some complacency that he has thrashed each of his children once, hard, and never needed to again. Now he is able to control them by ‘applied psychology’. We did not ask if Rae was included in the thrashings. (Statistics on domestic violence suggest that at least a quarter of all wives have been assaulted by their husbands at some time.) Fred puts a lot of energy into coaching local junior football teams and is president of their club; Rae is the treasurer. He takes, as a right, a couple of nights out for beers with the boys each week. Rae, even if she felt it the thing to do, does not have the time.
Clearly this is only the beginning of an analysis of Delia’s circumstances. It is perhaps enough to show that what lies behind her relationship with school and intentions about leaving, the original question in our research, is a very complex interplay of personal and social forces. Much of this has to do with her family’s class situation, as educational sociology has long insisted. But as much has to do with the fact that she is a young woman, growing up in a setting where relations between women and men work in a particular way.
We cannot understand Delia’s life without having a way of understanding the division of labour between women and men in her household, in other families she encounters, in Rae’s and Fred’s workplaces and in the school. We need to understand the power relations between husbands and wives, between men and women in trade unions and companies and in voluntary organizations like the football club. We need to understand how Rae’s femininity and Fred’s masculinity are constructed, how Delia’s sexual awakening is being managed, how images of femininity are conveyed to her. We cannot understand Delia without having some grasp of the tensions and contradictions in these processes and the ways they change between generations.
These are not independent issues. They interact; indeed they define a sphere of social life that is strongly patterned. As soon as this is recognized, it is obvious that the pattern is not peculiar to Delia, Rae and Fred. What happens in their milieu is part of a much wider set of social processes, which must be analyzed to understand what is happening in Delia’s life. Let us turn, therefore, to evidence about these patterns on the larger scale.
The Public World: Wages, Education, Jobs
The division of labour in Delia’s household and the kinds of jobs her mother and father hold outside, have roots in the conventional images of man-as-breadwinner and woman-as-home-maker. They also have a hard material base. We do not have Fred and Rae Prince’s tax returns but the general position is known. In 1978, the year of these interviews, the average wages for adult full-time employees in Australia were $239 a week if they were men, $183 if they were women. That is to say, a decade after the Equal Pay Case that established a notional policy of sex equality in pay rates, women got 77 per cent of what men got. By 1985 this had moved up to 82 per cent.
These figures greatly overstate the general level of equality. In the mid-1980s more women than men earn less than a full wage because they are less than full-time workers. About 36 per cent of employed women in Australia are part-timers (Rae Prince being one), compared with 6 per cent of employed men. Taking all employed people, women’s average earnings are 66 per cent of men’s (1985 figures). Further, a higher proportion of women workers earn no wage because they are are unemployed, and many more women than men have very low incomes because they are dependent on a pension or welfare benefit. Figures for 1981/2 show that 1.97 million women have social security as their main source of income compared with 0.78 million men. The result is that the average income of women who have any income at all is 48 per cent of the men’s average (1981/2). And even that overstates the degree of equality, since a higher proportion of women have no income at all. Adjusting for that, the average income of all women is 45 per cent of the average income of all men.
Statistics on wealth are harder to come by, as wealth is better concealed. But there is no doubt at all that men control the major concentrations of wealth in the Australian economy. The magazine Business Review Weekly compiles, from a miscellany of sources, an annual list of the 200 richest people in the country. In the 1985 list just four of the listed names were women.
Australia has a reputation for putting women down; are these figures exceptional? There are no systematic statistics on men’s and women’s incomes on a world scale. But there are many pointers to the state of affairs in individual countries. A recent International Labor Office study of manufacturing industries in twenty countries, for instance, shows that women’s wages are less than men’s wages in every country studied. As examples:
Figures for Eastern European economies show much the same pattern as in Western Europe:
A comparison of Latin American countries uses a different measure, setting cut-off points and showing what percentages of women and men fall above and below them. These figures show the percentages falling in the lowest income category in each country:
Clearly the pattern of unequal income is international, though the level of inequality varies from place to place.
One of the reasons for these differentials (though certainly not the only one) is unequal access to education and training. There are relatively systematic international statistics on literacy and participation in schooling. Though the overall levels of literacy claimed have to be taken with a certain scepticism, there is no reason to doubt the overall pattern of sex differences that emerge within each country.
To get a global picture in these and following comparisons, I have taken countries from six broad groupings: (1) United States (a group in itself); (2) EEC + Japan; (3) Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; (4) China + India; (5) second-tier capitalist; (6) poorest.
Access to jobs outside subsistence agriculture – as well as other sources of social power – is very much affected by whether you have been taught to read and write. Almost everywhere in the world, more men than women have been. Table 1 shows a selection of illiteracy rates, the percentage of the population reported illiterate.
Access to higher-level jobs is very much affected by advanced education. Men generally get more of this than women. The figures in table 2 are percentages of the adult population who have post-secondary education.
The differences in earnings shown on page 7 are compounded by massive differences in the numbers of women and men able to earn any income at all. There are systematic figures on this, because of the close interest taken in the size and composition of the ‘labour force’ by official agencies concerned with economic development. The World Bank, for instance, has statistics on what percentage women make of the (paid) labour force in every country, and has even totalled them across four groups of countries (the categories neatly reflecting the Bank’s own preoccupations). The figures are: for ‘developing countries’, 25 per cent; for ‘capital-surplus oil-exporting countries’, 5 per cent; for ‘industrialized countries’, 35 per cent; for ‘centrally planned economies’, 45 per cent. Examples of women’s share of the total labour force in countries selected from the six groupings defined earlier, are shown in table 3.
Table 1 Percentage of population reported illiterate
CountryWomen (%)Men (%)(1) United StatesNot given(2) Italy75(3) Poland21(4) India8152(5) Brazil2622(6) Indonesia4223Table 2 Percentage of adult population with post-secondary education
CountryWomen (%)Men (%)(1) United States2837(2) Japan1019(3) Poland47(4) India0.32(5) Brazil35(6) Egypt15Table 3 Women’s share of the total paid labour force
CountryPercentage share(1) United States38(2) West Germany36(3) Soviet Union50(4) China38(5) South Korea33(6) Colombia25Only in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and some parts of Black Africa, is women’s participation in the paid labour force close to that of men. In the rest of the world, men’s participation rates run at roughly twice those of women. The differences are startling in Arab countries, where it is exceptional for more than 15 per cent of the paid labour force to be women; here men’s participation rates are from five to twenty times as high as women’s.
A low labour-force participation rate certainly does not mean that large numbers of women do no work. What it means is that their work is not paid. They work mainly outside the cash economy, in housework, childrearing, subsistence agriculture, or labour for a husband or father who markets the product.
This is one aspect of an economic segregation between women and men that also runs through the money economy. In Australia, for instance, men hold 86 per cent of the jobs as administrators, executives and managers, but only 28 per cent of clerical jobs; 88 per cent of jobs in trades, process work, labouring and mining and 47 per cent of jobs in sales (1983 figures). A study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), covering the richer capitalist countries, shows that this pattern is international: ‘The coefficient of female representation shows that women are most under-represented in administrative and managerial occupations in all countries … Women are over-represented in clerical occupations in all countries … They are also over-represented in service occupations in all countries.’ When the broad groupings are broken down, as the OECD study also notes, the degree of concentration can be even more striking: ‘For example, in the United States in 1978, 97 per cent of registered nurses and 94 per cent of elementary teachers within this group were women, while 91 per cent of industrial engineers and 99 per cent of airplane pilots were men.’
One reason why women rarely appear near the top of the economic tree is that in a capitalist economy the ability to accumulate wealth is very much dependent on one’s ability to command credit. There is reason to think that lenders – banks and other financial institutions – do not extend the credit to women that they do to men. The New South Wales (NSW) Anti-Discrimination Board, currently studying this issue, cites cases such as this in the early 1980s: ‘A married couple … had a joint cheque account with the same suburban bank. They separated and then took out individual accounts with the same bank. They both overdrew. The man’s cheques were honoured though he overdrew by $1500. The woman’s cheques were bounced although she overdrew by only $300.’
Direct discrimination in terms of sex, marital status and the assumption that a husband is necessarily ‘head of the household’ and therefore a wife is not an independent agent, is compounded by the fact that several categories of people who are usually not given credit at all consist mainly of women. This includes people dependent on welfare payments and those with no current cash income. The difficulties this situation creates for women in getting finance to buy a house are familiar in the experience of women’s refuges.
Violence, Prejudice, the State
The lack of alternative housing is one of the reasons women may stay in, or return to, a violent marriage. Domestic violence is a very large part of all violence. It is difficult to get reliable statistics, but a good many pointers exist. A study of four police stations in different suburbs of Sydney in 1977–8 showed that calls to domestic assaults exceeded calls to other assaults – in some areas by a factor of three. (The notorious reluctance of police to intervene in domestic violence has some basis in the risk to the police themselves: in the United States about 20 per cent of police deaths in the course of duty occur in such cases.) A widely quoted study in Scotland found that 25 per cent of violent crimes reported to the police were assaults against wives and girlfriends. A national sample survey in the United States in the mid-1970s reported that 28 per cent of couples acknowledged at least one violent incident and estimated that the true figure was closer to 50 or 60 per cent. In a recent phone-in in Victoria 22 per cent of women had experienced domestic violence but did not report it. While violence by women against men is far from negligible, the majority of serious domestic assaults are by men against women.
This is part of a larger pattern of violence against women. Rapes reported to the police in Australia rose from around 600 a year in 1972–3 to over 1,200 in 1981–2. In the United States the figure rose from 47,000 in 1972 to 79,000 in 1983. There is reason to think that these figures are still very much understated and that most rapes are not reported to the police. An alternative approach is to conduct a survey of the general population asking people if they have been victims of various crimes. One such survey, done on a very large scale by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1983, estimated 26,700 sexual assaults on adult women during a year, including 8,600 rapes or attempted rapes. (Attacks on teenagers would have to be added to this figure.) This gives a rate of five sexual assaults for every 1,000 adult women, which may not seem very many until it is seen in its context of very widespread intimidation at a lower level, from wolf-whistles and shouted jokes to sexual harassment in workplaces. A number of the mothers we interviewed in Delia Prince’s suburb will not let their daughters go out on the neighbourhood streets at night because of the fear these assaults generate.
Homosexual men also have reason to fear assault in public places – and one of the main groups they have to fear are the police. There are no official statistics on these matters, but police violence on a considerable scale has been carefully documented for New York from 1960 through a twenty-year period in which the growing political strength of gays led to a decline in the attacks. The murder of Dr George Duncan in Adelaide in 1972 was almost certainly the result of an entertainment for off-duty police which consisted of bashing homosexual men and throwing them in the River Torrens; Dr Duncan could not swim.
Other groups also are involved in attacks on homosexuals. A 1985 phone-in conducted by Gay Hotline in Sydney (sponsored jointly by the police) over two days received calls describing fifty-three episodes of assault on homosexual men. In almost all these cases the attackers were groups of teenage boys or very young men, a fact that raises disturbing questions about the role of violence and homophobia in the construction of masculinity.
These attacks occur in a context of general hostility towards homosexuals that ranges from discrimination in housing to legal danger. Antagonism to lesbians is less explicit than to gay men – there is a tendency to make lesbians socially invisible. Nevertheless it becomes very clear in such cases as a lesbian mother fighting a custody battle in the courts. Lesbianism itself is liable to be offered as evidence that a woman is unfit to have custody of a child. Gay men face the criminal law because of their sexuality. In most of Australia it is still illegal for adult men to commit ‘the abominable crime of buggery’ or ‘indecent assault upon a male person’. In 1985 the state of Queensland even legislated to prevent hotels from serving beer to ‘sexual deviants or perverts’, meaning gays, along with ‘drug dealers’ and ‘child molesters’. This degree of legislative stigmatization is exceptional; the attitudes underlying it are not.
Statistics on the operation of these laws are patchy but an indication is given by a study of Sydney court cases by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. This showed 100 to 200 prosecutions a year in the 1940s, rising to 400 to 500 prosecutions a year from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. Great peaks and troughs (117 cases in 1966, 1,204 in 1968, a lull in the early 1970s) reflect changes in the intensity of policing. In the mid-1970s, when Sydney was well on the way to recognition as one of the ‘gay capitals’ of the world, the rate was rising again. In 1975 NSW courts processed 300 homosexual prosecutions under the Crimes Act and Summary Offences Act (plus others, their number uncertain, under the Child Welfare Act).
Police surveillance in pursuit of these laws merges into police harassment. ‘Decoy’ squads on homosexual beats produce a stream of individual prosecutions; there were said to be two such squads operating in Sydney in the mid-1980s, one in Adelaide. Much more publicity is gained by large-scale police raids on homosexual bars and baths, such as the 1977 raid on the Truxx bar in Montreal (146 arrested), the 1981 raid on bath houses in Toronto (304 arrested), or the 1983 raids on Club 80 in Sydney (over 100 arrested, though few charged). These patterns of intervention in turn merge into the violence already discussed.
While there are clear patterns of domestic assault and sexual assault against women and of violence against gays, there are other patterns of violence which affect men more drastically than women and heterosexual men as well as gays. The 1983 Australian national survey already mentioned estimated 113,000 assaults in a year against women and 278,000 assaults against men. In the same year there were 294 reported homicides in Australia: 41 per cent of the victims were women and 59 per cent were men. In the United States the 1978 rate of assaults per 1,000 people was 12 for women and 22 for men. In 1981 the United States had 23,600 homicides: 21 per cent were of women and 79 per cent were of men. In that year the rate of death by homicide per 100,000 people was 3 for white women, 13 for black women, 10 for white men and 65 for black men.
Those charged with or convicted of violent crime are overwhelmingly men. For instance, in NSW in 1983 some 519 people were convicted in the higher criminal courts of homicides, assaults and like crimes; 93 per cent of them were men. A study of homicide in NSW over a 50-year period found that between 80 per cent and 85 per cent of those charged were men. In the United States in 1983, 87 per cent of the people arrested for murder were men. In the same year men were 87 per cent of those arrested for aggravated assault, 88 per cent of those arrested for arson, and so on through other crimes of violence. Figures for other recent years are very similar.
So far as the official and semi-official figures go, then, it appears that men are more commonly than women the victims of serious interpersonal violence, and even more commonly the perpetrators.
The same is true of the institutional violence represented by the police, the prison system and the military. At the census of 1981 Australia had 30,200 police officers; 94 per cent of them were men. In June 1983, the most recent figures, there was a national prison population of 10,200; 96 per cent were men. The United States in 1983 had a prison population of 224,000; 93 per cent were men. This pattern too is international. The following figures are the percentage of prisoners in 1974 who were men:
The situation in the military is similar. In June 1984 the Australian army, navy and air force between them had a total strength of 71,600, of whom 93 per cent were men. A comparison of the major NATO forces in 1979–80 shows the same pattern:
The dominance of the military by men was even more complete in the past. The United States armed forces, for instance, were 99 per cent men in 1960, 1965 and 1970. The percentage of women began to creep up in the early 1970s, with a formal policy of expanding women’s role in the military starting in 1973. In most armies, nevertheless, women are forbidden to have a combat role. In anti-aircraft units in Britain during World War II women were allowed to do every job, including aiming the guns at the German planes – but not to pull the trigger.
What of those who control the machinery of state, who direct the police, the bureaucracies, the soldiers? It is notoriously difficult to locate actual power-holders with any precision, but a reasonable first approximation is possible, by looking at three groups from whom some key power-holders are certainly drawn: judges, generals and members of national parliaments (see table 4). The statistics on parliaments are relatively easy to get, and are shown for countries chosen from the six groups defined earlier. Figures for judges and generals are scrappy but illuminating. As a change, the figures given in this table are the percentages of women in the groups named.
Table 4 Women at upper levels of the state
CountryDateBodyPercentageParliaments(1) United States1984Congress4(2) Japan19854(3) Soviet Union1985Supreme Soviet33(4) India1985(federal)9(5) Australia1985(federal and state)9(6) Colombia19753Judges(1) United States1985state and federal courts7(2) Britain1984high, circuit and county courts3(3) Soviet Union1984People’s courts36(4) India19862(5) Australia1985all federal courts5Generals(1) United Statesearly 1980s0.6(2) Japan1986nil(3) Italy1986nil(4) Australia1986nilThe Soviet Union looks rather good on these figures. But in the communist systems power resides more in the Party than the parliament – and in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the participation of women in 1981 was 4 per cent.
At the end of an excellent review of the world-wide evidence on women in politics ten years ago, Kathleen Newland argued that a global change in the political position of women was under way. Legal equality (for example the right to vote) was now established and there was extensive participation in grass-roots politics. ‘Yet women have only rarely surfaced among the leaders in politics. They are nearly absent from the positions where policy is hammered out, where decisions are made, where real power resides.’ Ten years later it seems that not a great deal has changed. The levers of state power are still in men’s hands.
The facts just recited are a very small fragment of the evidence now available on the social positions of women and men and on relationships surrounding different forms of sexuality. Though some of the details will be relevant to later steps of the argument, just one conclusion needs to be drawn here. The patterns of gender and sex that appear through this evidence are not just an important feature of human life; they are specifically social. They involve inequalities of income, the working of institutions, the distribution of power, the division of labour and other distinctively social facts. Whether these social facts have non-social causes will be considered in chapter 4.
Two assumptions or working hypotheses underpin the argument that follows. First, that the facts set out in this chapter are connected with each other; that is, we are dealing not with a shapeless heap of data but with a social structure, an organized field of human practice and social relations. This hypothesis is needed to get the analysis under way, though the evidence cited already suggests that it is sound, given the way similar patterns reappear across different fields of social life. A general concern of the book, and the specific topic of Part II, is how this structure can be understood.
There is no convenient name for this subject. Terms like ‘sexual politics’ and ‘patriarchy’ are useful in pointing to parts of it but not to the whole. An American conference in the mid-1970s managed to invent a whole new science of gender and call it ‘dimorphics’; luckily no more was heard of that. Gayle Rubin wrote of ‘the sex/gender system’, which is better but begs questions about what exactly a ‘system’ is. Kate Young and her co-authors speak of ‘the social relations of gender’, the most precise term but an awkward phrase. ‘Gender relations’ is a reasonable abbreviation and I will use it as a name for the whole domain.
The second assumption is that the two ‘levels’ of fact discussed in this chapter – personal life and collective social arrangements – are linked in a fundamental and constitutive way. It makes no sense to theorize one without also theorizing the other. I introduced this chapter with a case study, not to humanize the statistics, but because of this basic point about method. The large-scale structures of gender relations are constituted by practices such as those Delia Prince and her family are engaged in. At the same time their practice cannot float free; it must respond to, and is constrained by, the circumstances which those structures constitute.
This is an abstract point in theory, but it is also a tangible reality. A final point about Delia will illustrate this. Delia told us she wanted to be a veterinarian. Her parents knew of this and were willing to bear the cost of her training, not a small matter for them. When we returned to that school several years later to report back and follow up, we learnt how things had turned out. Delia had left school at sixteen, as she had predicted; and she had found a job. It was a notable one both in terms of the general sexual division of labour and the specific history of her parents’ marriage. She was not a veterinarian but a veterinary nurse.
