Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson
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young girls’ (1989: 106).
Many of the major sexological studies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s were regarded as obscene, but this moral climate also meant that the ‘science’ of sexology was used to justify the contemporary social understandings of gender and sexuality. This, above all, meant the classification of a new type of person: the ‘invert’ or ‘homosexual’ as the antithesis of normal, moral, pure, natural masculinity. Many of the most influential works of the time focused on homosexual acts and, together with increased legal regulation, served to confirm homosexuality as a ‘perversion’ of the ‘natural’ order. The modern capitalist reordering of class and gender relations associated with the new middle- class morality also created a climate in which homosexuality was increasingly seen as a social problem and individual pathology, precisely as the ‘inversion’ of respectable heterosexuality. Moreover, this was focused on male homosexuality, with a lack of regulation of and public discussion on lesbianism (Weeks, 1989).
1.4 Defining Gender: The Second Wave
As Banks (1990) points out, it is difficult accurately to pinpoint the beginnings of second wave feminism because it emerged through a combination of grass- roots activism, nationally based political campaigns around key issues such as abortion, and the circulation of new ideas and research on women’s status by academics and activists. Many feminists were also involved in and influenced by the battle for civil rights in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s, and later and elsewhere by the emergence of the New Left: a range of radical political movements, often associated with anti- war protests (particularly against the USA–Vietnam conflict), critiques of capitalism and student politics. Furthermore, many feminists have described how the impetus to develop independent political action for women was in part a response to the sexism encountered in these other movements [8]. In the following brief sketch we outline how the protosociological ideas of first wave feminism were transformed, as a result of second wave feminism and gay liberation, into specifically sociological concepts and theories. In doing so, we cover a time span that stretches across three decades, illustrating that the impact of feminist and lesbian and gay thought on academic sociology was a drawn- out process, with many key academic publications appearing some time after the activism and political writings that inspired them.
Most historians of feminist movements agree that Britain, France and the United States became the initial centres of second wave feminist activity. This is not to deny the emergence of such concerns across other western societies, or indeed around the world, but it is to identify these countries as significant contexts for the development of feminist theories. Second wave feminist activism is notable for the entirely new development of radical feminism – radical, in part, because of its sociological approach – but this period also saw the re- emergence of earlier first wave traditions, and so most histories of feminism categorize the movement from the 1960s as having three distinct but related strands: liberal or equal rights; socialist or Marxist; and radical.
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).
In Britain and Western Europe more often than the USA or Canada, feminist politics developed in the organized labour union movements in conjunction with, and sometimes in reaction to, the politics of class. Thus, a Marxist or socialist feminist tradition re- emerged during this period, as had the equal rights tradition, but both were markedly different from first wave feminism in their emphasis on the social basis of women’s subordination, whether that was linked to employment and educational opportunities or the wider capitalist structure. Furthermore, both traditions were heavily influenced by what came to be termed radical feminism, which, for the first time, provided a range of analyses that conceptualized male domination as a social system. Feminists from all three traditions contributed to the development of a new concept: ‘gender.’
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.
In many, especially western, cultures, gender existed as a linguistic term denoting masculine and feminine, but as a social concept it was first used in the 1950s and 1960s by psychologists such as John Money and Robert Stoller to describe socially learned aspects of male and female behaviour as distinct from the biological categories male and female. This resonated with earlier anthropological work on the variability of sex roles, particularly that of Margaret Mead (1965 [1935]), which demonstrated that masculine and feminine behaviours and roles varied across cultures. Thus, the idea that masculinity and femininity might be acquired rather than innate was gradually taking root within some academic arenas, although its influence was not always progressive. John Money’s work developed in his attempts to understand intersex infants, producing a concept of gender identity that serves to justify medical interventions to ‘correct’ anatomy (Hird, 2004: 133; see also Ch. 10.1). It was not until the 1970s that ‘gender’