Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Stevi Jackson
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Управление, подбор персонала
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509555253
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young girls’ (1989: 106).

       TASK: The history of women’s suffrage and feminist movements.

      First, find out when women won the vote in your own country or locality and whether this was after men got the vote. How does the timing of this compare with other countries/localities?

      Second, try to identify a relevant women’s organization that was involved in suffrage campaigns. Was there an understanding of gender as social in their campaigns?

      Some suggested starting points (and see note 8): www.womenshistory.about.com; www.now.org; www.unesco.org/women

      Equal rights feminism had developed during the first wave in the late nineteenth century, its main achievement being the right of women to vote in many nations in the early twentieth century. Its influence then declined in the mid- twentieth century, partly because of a loss of momentum once the vote was achieved, and partly as women entered professional and trade union organizations for the first time in significant numbers. Historians point to a resurgence of equal rights feminism in the 1960s in both Britain and the USA, with bodies such as the National Organization for Women emerging in the USA, and smaller such groups in Britain. Crucially, this resurgence was linked to wider changes in the social status of women, particularly in terms of their increasing participation in the labour market (Banks, 1990).

      A recent dictionary of sociology entry under ‘gender’ both shows its acceptance as a major sociological concept and defines its use:

      If the sex of a person is biologically determined, the gender of a person is culturally and socially constructed. There are thus two sexes (male and female) and two genders (masculine and feminine). The principal theoretical and political issue is whether gender as a socially constructed phenomenon is related to or determined by biology. (Abercrombie et al., 2006: 163)

      This definition conveys the central point that the concept of gender contests biological essentialism but it does not expand on the ways in which the concept is used sociologically. For a little more insight, you can flick forward to the entry under ‘sociology of gender’, which outlines the ‘ways in which the physical differences between men and women are mediated through culture and social structure’ (Abercrombie et al., 2006: 371), thus reassuringly beginning to talk about key sociological concepts to which we can all relate. The entry goes on to mention briefly the issues of identity formation, public/ private and divisions of labour, as well as ideologies of gender. This demonstrates that there is an understanding in mainstream sociology today that gender is a key sociological concept and social division.

      Weber had talked about patriarchal authority, but his use of the term was limited to how legitimate power in traditional societies was vested in male heads of household, and he did not expand his gaze to discuss men and women as socially distinct groups. Engels had similarly focused on the family as a functional unit for capitalism in that monogamous marriage ensured control of women’s reproductive sexuality so that bourgeois men could pass on their property to their ‘rightful’ heirs, but, like Weber, he saw women and men as ‘natural’ categories rather than social ones. Patriarchy is a term we will discuss in detail below, but first note that neither of these classical sociologists referred to gender in the way in which it is defined above. Early sociologists did recognize the differences between men and women’s social position, but they did not develop a way of thinking about this as fully social.