Gender

Class Questions: Feminist Answers

Joan Acker

Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Oxford

2006

Class and Stratification

Rosemary Crompton

Polity Press

Cambridge

2008

3rd edition

These are three excellent books which deal with the complex inter‐relationships of gender, race and class. Both Bradley (2007) and Acker (2006) employ the personal in order to show and understand the political. For both authors' gender and class is a lived experience. Bradley provides us with a fresh and very lucid account by drawing upon her own personal experiences, examining gender through the lenses of production, reproduction and consumption. Acker develops a framework for understanding and analysing the implications of organizations in the production and reproduction of gendered, race and class relations. Crompton provides the reader with a cultural approach to class analysis. Like Bradley, her new edition covers recent work on social mobility and education. All of the authors address new developments in social mobility, educational opportunity and social polarization and successfully weave together current issues of class, focusing upon on‐going processes and practices of inequality in contemporary society.

Gender by Harriert Bradley is divided into a series of short chapters that set out key gender‐related issues and dilemmas and attempts to conceptualize gender at the abstract and concrete levels. The early chapters examine the major theoretical perspectives within which the concept of gender has been deployed. Bradley's gender concepts are traced through an informative mixture of texts, a personal story, a series of vignettes and illustrative sketches to explain the centrality of gender in everyday life. She identifies a complex inter‐relationship between gender and other social processes, although her particular slant focuses on how the term gender is currently utilized. She also discusses gender as a wider social phenomenon that impacts on the experiences of each one of us as individuals and notes that gender shapes the life and experiences of men and women in relation to each other. The narratives and vignettes she provides illustrate and explore the way gender is lived in peoples lives. Interestingly, she raises the importance of the narratives and vignettes by presenting them in different type face so that they are easily identified. For Bradley, the personal stories of her, and others, illustrate a series of gender‐related issues and dilemmas that people often face.

Gender issues have become a prominent concern for many academics such as Walby (1997) and Acker (1990) and this book provides a lucid account of the main theoretical approaches. The book introduces the concept of gender and the different theoretical approaches that have developed since the emergence in the 1970s of the second wave of feminist study. Bradley perceives gender as a “busy term” that is widely used, in differing contexts and is continually evolving. The meaning has become slippery because she argues that the term is politically charged, bound up in the struggles between men and women and centrally involved in various displays of power. Her main thesis is that gender affects every important aspect of our lives.

Bradley draws substantially upon the work of Acker to reinforce the idea that an organizational or analytical unit is gendered, which means that there must be advantages and disadvantages, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity and that these are patterned through the distinction between male and female and masculine and feminine. She further argues that gender is classed, can be highly specific and can lead to different types of adult manhood and womanhood.

Bradley draws upon the work of Marx when she orders her discussion through the notion that there are three key “spheres” of social life: production, reproduction and consumption. As well as these three “spheres” Bradley puts forward the suggestion that “gendering” takes place at three levels; the macro level of the social totality, the meso or institutional level and the level of individual interaction, the micro level. She follows Walby's (1997) argument that the twentieth century has seen the evolution of the system of public patriarchy, which is manifested in employment and the state. Unlike Walby, she develops a central argument that the family is the dominant site of the formation of gender and therefore gender equality. Women have long been identified within the private sphere and take responsibility for the care of the home and children. She argues that some men retain positions of power and authority in the labour market and in political and other institutions. Women remain confined to subordinate and secondary roles, in a way which serves to proclaim the superiority of some men.

Production occurs in modes of production, with the current mode driven by the demands of profit. Changes in gender relations are driven, mainly, at the macro level. Work is divided horizontally into “men's” and “women's” work, and in large organizations, divided vertically so that the top of the hierarchy is male dominated. This combination allows her to identify what Crompton identifies as “gendered niches” in which pay disparities are obvious and argues that very early on in our lives, individuals learn what “type of work” is suitable for their sex and uses examples of male homosociality as a way for some men to keep women in their place.

Reproduction is closely linked to production and is shaped by the way the mode of production is organized. Amongst the key socio‐economic activities necessary to keep the production system going is the reproduction of the next generation of workers, involving inter alia socializing children into future social roles. Because women take the major responsibility for reproduction, a domestic division of labour arises. Bradley notes, interestingly, that while young males espouse egalitarian ideas within marriage (or co‐habitation) they are still under pressure to take on male attitudes and practices of “hegemonic” masculinity.

Consumption, the process of exchange of goods and services, is shaped and constrained by class and gender. Harriet Bradley sees us all as consumers but argues that the process is classed and gendered. She uses the historical growth of the changing patterns of consumption to show that the changing roles of women in the workplace have shaped different shopping patterns. She also observes that the type of shopping done by men and women is different. Women tend to buy the domestic orientated goods, whereas men's shopping is more focused and pragmatic, often for personal leisure consumption.

Her conclusion subtitled “What the future holds – gender, theory and politics”, sets out a possible future for the analysis of gender relations, especially those issues of power, “intersectionality”, “identity” and “utopia”. She takes us back to her central argument vis‐à‐vis the “spheres” of social life, production, reproduction and consumption. She quotes Delemont (2001) in stating that the future is depressing in the context of gender and change. For Bradley, the structures of power and economic equality have only been dented. Her last chapter sketches some ideas and priorities for the future study of gender. She returns to the dynamics she addresses earlier in the book, those of ethnicity and class. Class encompasses the organization of production and the operation of labour markets. She proposes that “race” corresponds to ethnicity as gender does to sex. Racialized groups are often seen as inferior and can be excluded or marginalized where they are the minority group. She further argues that the distrust and distain shown by the dominant class groups is bringing forward an increasingly class‐segregated society in Britain where, for example, the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful attend private schools to protect them from the despised “chavs”. Therefore, these dynamics have both material and cultural aspects.

She also returns to the concept of power, noting that some groups of men are able to control some of the most crucial sources of power resources, namely, physical power, economic power and symbolic power. But they do not possess overwhelming power. Groups and individuals can use power in the form of rules and resources to achieve their ends.

Finally, Bradley returns to the topic of intersectionality which she has addressed on several occasions but only at a relatively superficial level. For her, intersectionality raises the importance of addressing the need to look at how class intersects with gender. Her concern is that examining just a single aspect of disadvantage may lead to distortions and may also mask other forms of oppression such as the claim of black feminists about the work of white second‐wave theorists. She also warns that using a totalistic theory, based on one dynamic, presents a distorted view of all women as victims. She ends on a positive note, though, noting that we have come a long way since the 1940s, but there is a long road ahead.

Joan Acker's book, entitled Class Questions: Feminist Answers, is part of the Gender Lens series. This series identifies, and uses, a “gender lens” which means working to make gender visible as a social phenomena and asking why and how social processes, standards and opportunities differ systematically for men and women. The series of books are committed to social change directed towards eradicating gender inequalities. In this context, Acker develops a framework for understanding and analysing the implications in the production and re‐production of gendered and racial class relations. She argues that capitalist organizations are characterized by gendered and racialized class inequalities.

At the outset, Acker argues that class matters. New class inequalities have arisen from global, national and local changes in capitalist production and politics. She also sees that the concept of class is problematic because it was developed as a question relating to the domination by groups of privileged white males. Despite this, the concept of class for women and people of other racial groups is still a problem. Her book attempts to identify a concept of class that resolves the problem of combining gender, race and class. For her it is important not only to look at class relations of production and paid labour, but also to include the relations of distribution and unpaid labour. The key term is the intersectionality of race, gender and class that enables scholars to understand the complex inequalities in society.

She begins with an overview of gender as an analytical dimension and identifies three stages in the study of women and men since the 1970s. Firstly, gender differences were seen as biological differences. This was followed by a shift in focus towards individual sex roles where gender became a product of specific social arrangements. Finally, the recognition of the centrality of gender as an organizing principle in all social systems became important. The problem for Acker is that male theorists (Goldthorpe, 1983) often ignore the question of women and gender and the importance of white male privilege in the development of class relations. The processes that constitute the capitalist economy also constitute gendered and socialized segregation, and have resulted in the production of gendered and racialized inequalities. These processes constitute a gendered and racialized substructure of capitalism and its class relations. Acker shows that capitalism has been gendered and racialized historically because it evolved as a process dominated by small groups of white men and became legitimized with images of masculinity.

The book addresses the ways in which feminists have theorized class inequalities. Her analysis starts with early Second Wave feminist criticisms of class and moves to more recent proposals for theorizing of class and gender. Acker also addresses patriarchy and the factors that have made women invisible as well as contemporary efforts to theorize gender and class. Reproduction is reconsidered along with the intersectionality of race, gender and class as mutually constituting practices and processes. Nevertheless, she argues that class is still an important category of analysis.

Acker argues that because the systems of production and reproduction were initially set up to meet the needs of profit, women were relegated to reproduction. As a result, caring work was devalued and this is now central to women's class situation. She proposes that a racialized theory of class needs to take account of the historically differing experiences of diverse racial/ethnic groups, which includes women and men. Employers acting on their (perceived and/or real) economic interests often hire people from a particular racial/gender group as it suits employers' needs. The effects of these gendered and racialized class practices can be identified through the inequalities of power, money and the segregation of jobs and occupations. A high proportion of jobs are identified as gendered and racialized. This is often manifested in stereotypes of low‐paid workers from particular gender or racial groups and interacts with other conscious or non‐conscious gendered and racial assumptions. These stereotypes and assumptions shape the ways in which people relate to one another in general, and the way people negotiate the labour market and employment in particular.

Acker addresses the conceptual approaches to thinking about class, gender and race by looking at daily life, including social relations, addressing the way social structure reflects class relations and outlining the relations of unpaid and paid work in production and reproduction. In the process, gendered and often racialized segregation and inequalities were, and are still, being produced.

Acker argues that in the pursuance of material interests, when corporate leaders organize work and construct rules and unwritten expectations, they implicitly operate with a male model of the “worker”. Large, white male organizations are often centres of symbolic affirmation of existing gender, race and class inequalities and are major arenas where these relations are reproduced in broader areas of society. Defining jobs as bundles of tasks that fit into class‐related hierarchies also involves gender and race with hidden assumptions of appropriate work for socially constructed categories of people.

It is argued that women from different racial and ethnic groups were incorporated into labour market and employment arrangements that were different to those for men through the historical emergence of the male breadwinner which produced a subtle process of the continuous recreation of racial and gendered inequalities. Acker argues that gender segregation of paid labour has emerged through the images and actions of some white men who dominate and lead central capitalist endeavours. Gender segregation affects women in all racial groups partially through the ideology and actuality of women as carers. Images of dominant male bodies as being different from female bodies allows them to distance themselves from caring.

Acker argues that large organizations continuously recreate the masculine model of organization, and the worker, as unconnected to, and therefore not responsible for, the work of human reproduction, working on the assumption that men are not responsible for the reproduction of human beings. Organizations shape class relations as they decide what to produce or offer, who to employ and what wages to pay. The size of the organization also influences the ways in which gendered and class relations are created. Organizational hierarchies of power and reward are structured around differentiated bases of race and gender. White, mostly male elites are in top positions.

Acker proposes that the role of powerful organizations shapes the practices of gender and racialized class. Organizations are understood in terms of the concepts of “inequality regimes” and are essentially configurations of inequality producing practices and processes that can differ over time. Inequality regimes are a way of exploring gendered and racialized class practices. Within organizations, inequality regimes and the characteristics that create and maintain inequalities are integral to getting work done. Basic capitalist processes are built on gendered divisions and economic power lies in a domain controlled by some white men and defined as masculine. Power lies with the white males who run organizations. Acker concludes that all organizations have inequality regimes with hierarchies of power and authority in which class relations are created and recreated in the ordinary processes of getting the work done.

The inequality regime has a number of interconnected dimensions which provide our understanding of the bases of inequality. These include the dimensions of sexual orientation and age, organizing practices that maintain inequalities, including job hiring, wage setting and the role of horizontal and vertical segregation. Because of this, efforts such as affirmative action often fail. Affirmative action increased the visibility of both gender and race, based on their exclusion from organizations but did not bring equality and equity. A strong reaction against affirmative action, on the grounds that it discriminates against white men in particular, had by the beginning of the twenty‐first century, greatly reduced its use and its enforcement.

Lastly, Acker points towards the way that contemporary changes in work and employment at all levels from local to global are contributing to increased inequalities. The move from manufacturing to service sector jobs, for example, has reinforced gendered work. Gender and class patterns have polarized as income and wealth inequality increases, often via tax reduction favouring the wealthy. Patterns of gendered/racial/class income wage disparities linked to segregation continue to exist. The poorest families become poorer, the most affluent families become more affluent and black family income is 62 per cent of that for white families (Mishel et al., 2003). A significant development used by Wal‐Mart for example, is the off‐shoring of technical and professional jobs and has implications for the low‐waged, low skills, low benefits model. Acker concludes that “good” and “bad” service sector jobs have resulted in gendered and racialized class patterns.

Acker provides a summary of all her findings in the concluding chapter “Conclusion: some optimistic proposals”, where she offers an optimistic view of the future. She does this by summarizing and examining some policy changes of the organization of work/production and distribution. An important consideration is the gendering of skilled work which has historically excluded women. The skilled industrial worker is conceived of as masculine, tough, strong, fearless and assured. These images are still evident in job classification schemes that define tasks and hierarchies of positions often with gendered assumptions about skill and responsibility levels of different jobs, categorizing female – dominated jobs as less skilled. She recommends that in the future, organizing child care and rewarding unpaid and caring work should not be devalued and that women should primarily be seen as household “managers”. Family‐friendly policies do not seem to be an adequate solution when attempting to knit together paid and unpaid work. The standard employment contract remains the same with times and place and duration unlikely to change a great deal. When organizations ignore the demands of caring, this confirms and entrenches the subordinate place of reproduction and women. Acker remains optimistic and in her final words she reminds us that many changes have been brought about through vocal movements (e.g. civil rights and the women's movement) whose demands for change have made a difference. Acker's optimism is linked to the responses of corporations in the demand for changes being heard. Acker and Bradley agree that gendered and radicalized class patterns have changed over the last 35 years with women gaining some autonomy as earners. Bradley takes the view that a “climate of equality” exists and that there have been challenges to the hierarchy. She proposes that our lives are positioned by processes of gendering but that these have changed over time. Both authors propose that although there has not been a radical change a slow gradual process is taking place.

Rosemary Crompton's revised edition of Class and Stratification explains not only why it is important to understand class and stratification, but also how the tools of class and stratification can help us understand and confront problems of gender and racial inequality. The third edition has been extensively revised, updated and expanded to incorporate discussions of contemporary economic and social change. In the first edition, published in 1992, the major argument related to problems stemming from the equation of occupation with class. The theoretical ideas relating to social class had been grafted onto an existing approach to social stratification in which “classes” were taken to be occupational aggregates.

The first edition was written to provide an overview which (it was hoped) would move the class debate forward. The second edition, published in 1997, extended the discussion and the controversy which has become intertwined with the so called “end of class” debate. The third edition, published in 2008, extends the discussion of many of the debates surrounding class and argues that class analysis is alive and flourishing. Crompton still holds the view that in order to understand the class debate what is required is a combination of different approaches to class and stratification rather than the development of a “new” approach or perspective. While she also considers it essential to recognize that very real social and economic changes have taken place over the last 50 years, she warns us to remain cautious in assuming that a fundamental societal shift has taken place requiring completely new or transformed analytical tools.

The third edition of the book extends the discussion of the intertwined debates on class and the consequences of this intertwining for our understanding of “class analysis”. Crompton also addresses a focus on the strategy of measuring class by dividing up employment structure. She points towards the fact that class analysis is alive and flourishing and that the revival of interest in “class analysis” has been accompanied by an increasing interest in the culture of class and culturalist explanations in general terms. She identifies, and makes extensive use of, Bourdieu's work on the cultural dimensions of class. She proposes that his work makes the assumption that “class” inequalities are reproduced and sustained through individuals daily actions. People unconsciously align themselves with others in similar social positions and particular tastes (in food, music, etc.) are preferred to those of other groups.

Crompton reflects upon the fact that while producing the revised edition she realized how much has disappeared. These disappearances include summaries of feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s, extended debates around citizenship, much of the literature on race and extensive discussions of the service class and changes in employment. She apologizes for the absence of a specific focus on race, acknowledging that this may be a weakness, adding that her interest in the impact of gendered division of labour has been embedded into chapter eight, a revised and updated discussion. Bradley and Acker focus specifically on gender, class and ethnicity issues proposing that class processes are shaped through gender and race. For both authors their focus highlights the centrality of gender in everyday life.

For Crompton, a key objective of the new edition is to recognize the real changes that have taken place, while further recognizing that there are still underlying societal continuities. She argues that the societal continuities that have taken place are intertwined with class and stratification. For this reason her approach means that an historical perspective is essential – not only in relation to events of the recent past, but also in relation to dominant ways (or “theories”) of thinking about them. It also means that many ideas and perspectives which are often presented as “new” or contemporary often have their roots in much older debates. She argues that recognizing these origins will give a better understanding of current discourses.

Crompton focuses upon the unequal divide of what is commonly described as “class structure”. She visits this through two broad analytical categories. The first category is “occupational class schemes”, which she sees as common sense descriptive measure, often overlapping with subjective scales of occupational prestige or social ranking. The second category, which is theoretical, is “occupational class schemes”, often constructed with explicit reference to the approaches of Marx and Weber. She then goes on to outline why it is difficult to use an occupational measure of class by drawing upon Weber's approach to social class which was very different from that of Marx, as the latter regarded social class as something more than occupational aggregates. For Weber, a social class is made up of the totality of those class situations within which individual and generational mobility is easy and typical. For Marx, the concept of class refers to positions within the social division of labour, the concept of class refers primarily to social relations at work, or positions within the social division of labour.

Although class and stratification are often used interchangeably, she argues that it is important to make a distinction between the two. Stratification is a more general term as it includes a wide range of factors including the extent of social recognitions and esteem, gender, age, ethnicity, income and other material resources. In contrast the term “class” is often reserved for descriptions of material inequalities and their origins. She states that this book is discussing “class” as a purely modern phenomenon and although class existed previously, the idea of class has become a key concept through which we understand contemporary society. This has had the effect of a revival of interest in the work of Bourdieu's approach to class analysis which combines economy with culture. Crompton proposes that the revival of interest in class analysis has been accompanied by increased interest in cultures of class and culturalist explanations more generally. While the “cultural turn” was a major theoretical shift that resulted in the increasing questioning, even rejection, of “class analysis” in the closing decade of the twentieth century, Crompton does not follow this line of reasoning. Instead, she combines cultural and economic dimensions of class, thus following Bourdieu.

A major focus for Crompton is that class reproduction has both economic and cultural dimensions. Class divisions are not just defined by differing access to the means of production, as in traditional Marxist analysis, but also by differing conditions of existence, in which differing systems of dispositions manifested in people's actions are produced by differing endowments of power and capital. The processes of material and cultural reproduction are intertwined but analytically are often treated as distinct. She argues that much of the re‐production of social classes takes place within the family. The role of family in the reproduction of social class and class inequalities is identified by mobility and educational achievement – or its absence. Social mobility not only plays a key role in determining life chances but also in justifying continuing inequalities. She argues that the quasi‐market in education has made the middle classes better equipped to compete in the education market. She concludes that class‐based inequalities due to changes in the education system are increasing.

Taking an explicit turn to consider gender Crompton addresses the way industrial society was consolidated to develop the “male breadwinner” model. Crompton argues that from the mid‐nineteenth century, women were largely excluded from paid work. The growth of second‐wave feminism accompanied the increasing participation of women in paid employment. By the 1980s and 1990s, feminist thinking made a major contribution to identity politics. She cites the work of Bradley (1996) in particular who sought to pull together classical or modernist approaches to understanding inequalities with the newer perspective. While Crompton agues that although Bradley provides a synthesis or a “better version” of class as well as some valuable insights, she believes that Bradley fails to provide a theoretical underpinning to this. For Crompton, Bradley only relates a series of descriptive statements relating to the interaction of class, gender, race and age. Crompton argues that, what has emerged in the “new directions”, that is, in new and revised approaches to understanding inequalities, is the idea that there is no “one best way” of carrying out a class analysis. Her approach has therefore been to argue that particular approaches to “class” may be very different from each other, and despite focusing on different things, they are not necessarily incompatible. For her, the most fruitful way ahead in the “class analysis” lies within the recognition of plurality and difference.

Crompton argues that inequalities associated with race and gender are largely a consequence of misrecognition and status subordination, rather than economic “class” processes. Misrecognition has been argued to be a form of institutionalized subordination. It means that the group identified is prevented from “participating as a peer in social life”. It might be argued that the misrecognition of women has gone some way to being redressed. While women are no longer (always) seen as inferior to men, it is the case that deep‐seated, gendered and normative beliefs still persist that impede parity of participation. Crompton argues that deep‐seated, gendered; normative beliefs still persist that impede “parity of participation” which is evident in the allocation of women to domestic and caring work. She proposes that a parallel argument could be developed in respect of race, as there is still an awareness of the persistence of race‐based inequalities.

In conclusion, Crompton notes that while issues relating to family life and caring have historically been seen as women's issues, they are gaining in importance and recognition outside of the confines of gender analysis. Indeed, she goes on to note that while material pressures are of greatest concern for the working class, for managerial and professional employees the problem of work‐life conflict is a major concern.