Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson
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number of feminist academics began focusing our attention on the social status of women as a social group, though it is important to note that there was some feminist sociological work on sex roles well before this time (see Ch. 3.4). There were two particularly influential contributions that established gender as a critical concept. The first of these was Ann Oakley’s book Sex, Gender and Society (1972), in which she argued strongly for gender to be understood as a matter of culture – with historical and cultural variations – rather than as a simple matter of biology. Following this, Gayle Rubin’s essay ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’ (1975) drew upon anthropological studies to describe how the social organization of marriage, kinship and reproduction gave rise to ‘sex/gender systems’, again making it plain that the social position of men and women, and their hierarchical relationship, could not be reduced to biological sex.
Other sociologists at that time began to produce research and theory on women’s social situation, addressing such issues as housework, employment, sexual exploitation, as well as the overall structure of male- dominated or patriarchal society. Central to all such work was the development of the idea of gender as a sociological concept. Moreover, linked to this conceptualization of gender was an identification of sexuality as a key dimension of gender inequalities, and an increasing awareness that the essentialist sex–gender system privileges heterosexuality over homosexuality and other nonreproductive behaviours.
2 Sociological Challenges to Essentialism
2.1 The Feminine Mystique and Liberal Feminism
Although liberal or equal rights feminism had a long tradition of seeking legal reforms to promote equal opportunities for women, in this period it began to be more sociological in its framing. For example, in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan put forward a radical argument that middle- class women were ensnared in an ideological construction of femininity which had nothing to do with their biology or innate ‘natures’, and everything to do with subordinating women as domestic servants. So the post- Second World War advent of domestic labour- saving devices (like the vacuum cleaner and dishwasher) were not helping women to expand their role beyond domesticity, but rather enshrining this position by marketing the goods to women as routes to more leisure time for them, rather than opportunities for them to enter education and the labour market. Friedan’s text became an early classic of second wave feminism, in large part because she provides a wide- ranging analysis of how the ideology of the ‘feminine mystique’ is sustained by social institutions such as the media, churches and the family (though she did not use the term ‘gender’). Thus, even liberal feminists were acknowledging and contributing to a more sociological analysis of why and how women are subordinated by widening their gaze to include economic and educational resources and the beliefs that sustained particular definitions of masculinity and femininity. Friedan was a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), America’s most prominent liberal feminist political action group (see note 8). Their ‘Bill of Rights’, which was adopted at NOW’s first national conference, in Washington, DC, in 1967, focused primarily on equal rights measures:
1 Equal Rights Constitutional Amendment.
2 Enforce Law Banning Sex Discrimination in Employment.
3 Maternity Leave Rights in Employment and in Social Security Benefits.
4 Tax Deduction for Home and Child Care Expenses for Working Parents.
5 Child Day Care Centers.
6 Equal and Unsegregated Education.
7 Equal Job Training Opportunities and Allowances for Women in Poverty.
8 The Right of Women to Control Their Reproductive Lives.
(Morgan, 1970: 512)
First and foremost, this manifesto discusses how laws can provide equal rights to redress gender discrimination. But, crucially, discrimination is seen as social; as a general set of beliefs and ideas about women which have become institutionalized – through education, the tax system, medical systems and in family structures. Furthermore, this Bill of Rights also acknowledges the importance of other social bases of gender inequality, such as women’s economic position, racial identities and child- care responsibilities. Indeed, this Bill of Rights makes it plain that both ideological beliefs in women’s inferiority and other social bases of inequality, such as class, need to be challenged.
Your World: What are the contemporary expectations of femininity, masculinity and domesticity in your culture?
Friedan was reacting in part to the establishment of psychological essentialism, which, by the mid- twentieth century, was the dominant means of explaining masculine and feminine identities and attributes. Psychology had emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century and had influenced the contemporary discipline of sexology: the study of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour (see Ch. 1.3). Psychoanalysis, a branch of psychology developed by Sigmund Freud and his followers, became particularly influential in understandings of gender and sexuality, especially in the USA, where it was widely used in the clinical treatment of neuroses. Freud published a number of essays in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, introducing the idea that gendered and sexual identity was established through the dynamics of family relationships rather than being inborn. Many have suggested, however, that as psychoanalysis became more widely applied in clinical settings, it ultimately pathologized both women’s sexuality and homosexuality. In large part this was because Freud argued that psychologically ‘healthy’ adulthood required appropriate heterosexual femininity and masculinity, suggesting that homosexuality was either a psychologically immature or perverse identity and, furthermore, that adult heterosexual women would be ‘naturally’ sexually passive. Freudian ideas therefore contributed to the variety of taken- for- granted essentialist ideas: that male sex drives were dominant over female; that heterosexual sex was the mature and normal form of sex; and that homosexuality was an ‘inversion’ of this natural order and limited to a minority of psychologically flawed individuals. Many liberal feminists in this era therefore rejected Freudian ideas, although their critique was focused on gender subordination rather than the stigmatization of homosexuality (see section 2.5 below).
2.2 Radical Feminism and the Concept of ‘Patriarchy’
Going several steps further than liberal feminism, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971) detailed the multi- dimensional social aspects of male domination, or what she termed ‘patriarchy’. Millett’s was a theoretical argument developed from her analysis of literature, focusing on contemporary American male novelists’ depictions of sex. She took the broad position that literature reflected the wider cultural meanings circulating in the society of its time, and her argument was that these literary examples illustrated women’s subordination through the stories that the authors created and the language they used. For example, she says of the ‘four- letter’ ‘c’ word that reduces a woman to her vagina:
Two ideas strike me – that the four- letter word derives from a puritanical tradition which is vigorously anti- sexual, seeing the act as dirty, etc. This in turn derives from a conviction that the female is sex and therefore both dirty and inferior to the intellectual and rational, and therefore masculine, ‘higher nature’ of humanity. The error is not a matter of language but of attitude … the study of meaning leads us to understand the motives language institutionalizes. (Millett, 1971: 325)
Although Millett starts from a literary analysis, she does make the sociological point that cultural meanings – expressed in language – reflect wider social power relationships. Along with other feminists writing at that time, she used the term ‘patriarchy’ to describe these wider power relationships. Whilst patriarchy was not a new concept,