Gender Transformations

Sylvia Walby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134809448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The answer of course is both. In this lucid and subtle investigation, Sylvia Walby, one of the world's leading authorities on gender shows how undoubted increases in opportunity for women in Europe and America have been accompanid by new forms of inequality. She charts changes in women's employment, education and political representation and the complex relations between gender, class and ethnicity, between local conditions and global pressures which together determine the place of women both in the labour market and in the wider social, political and economic world of today.
An eagerly awaited successor to Walby's classic Theorising Patriarchy, Transforming Gender will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in how questions of gender remake and are remade by the social and economic conditions in which they occur.

1: INTRODUCTION

FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Fundamental transformations of gender relations in the contemporary Western world are affecting the economy and all forms of social relations. The driving forces behind these changes are the increase in women’s education and paid employment and new forms of political representation of women’s interests. These changes have implications not only for women’s positions in wider society, in all their diversity, but also for the overall economy and polity.

For example, women are now almost half of all workers in the contemporary UK. In 1995 they were 49.6 per cent of employees in employment (Employment Gazette, April 1996) and indeed in one-third of local labour markets women were the majority of those in work (see Appendix 1). This is a major transformation of gender relations in employment. These transformations are having far-reaching implications not only for gender relations but for social relations in society as a whole, including class relations. However, much of this new employment of women is not performed under conditions equal to those of men. Another example is in education, where girls are passing more exams at schools than boys, creating new possibilities for young women. However, these are achievements for younger women, and older women have significantly fewer qualifications than their male peers.

The system of gender relations is changing, from one which was based on women being largely confined to the domestic sphere, to one in which women are present in the public sphere, but still frequently segregated into unequal positions. This change ultimately derives from the winning of political citizenship by first-wave feminism in the early twentieth century in the context of an increasing demand for women’s labour in a developing economy and women’s access to education at all levels. The patterns of inequality between women and men have changed as a result, but in complex ways, not simply for better or worse.

Gender restructuring affects women differently according their position, not only in class and ethnic relations, but also within different household forms. Diversity among women is a result not only of class and ethnicity, but also of changes in the forms of patriarchy, of gender regime, giving rise to significant generational differences.

CONVERGENCE AND POLARISATION IN GENDER RELATIONS

Both convergence and polarisation mark the contemporary restructuring of gender relations. Convergence between the genders is occurring among some younger people especially where increased access to education and the labour market for some young women has reduced the differences and inequality between the sexes in qualifications and work. Polarisation is occurring between women of different generations, as young women gain qualifications and labour market positions which are out of reach to older women who built their lives around a different set of patriarchal opportunity structures. Those younger women who do not achieve educational qualifications and entry to good jobs are also disadvantaged, and are especially poor if they become mothers without a supporting partner. To a significant extent women are polarising between those, typically younger, educated and employed, who engage in new patterns of gender relations somewhat convergent with those of men, and those, particularly disadvantaged women, typically older and less educated, who built their life trajectories around patterns of private patriarchy. These new patterns are intertwined with diversities and Inequalities generated by social divisions including class, ethnicity and region.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN GENDER RELATIONS

Changes have been taking place unevenly in different aspects of gender relations, in the six patriarchal structures outlined in Theorising Patriarchy. The leading change has been the increase in women in education and paid employment, though this is tempered by the variable ways in which women are involved, for instance, the poor conditions of the nearly half of employed women who work part-time and by the tenacity of occupational and industrial segregation. The wages gap between women and men full-time workers has narrowed, though not that for part-timers. There has been a dramatic closing of the gap in educational qualifications of young men and women, both at school and University. Changes in these two areas will be explored in detail in the following chapter.

The structure of the typical household has changed, with an increasing propensity for women to live and to rear children outside of marriage, especially as a result of increased rates of divorce and cohabitation. The divorce rate in the UK has risen from 0.5 per 1,000 in 1960, to 3.1 per 1,000 in 1993, and is now the highest in the European Union (EUROSTAT, 1995:130–1). The proportion of women aged 18–49 who are married has declined from 74 per cent in 1979 to 57 per cent in 1994 (OPCS, 1996b:34). The proportion of families headed by a lone parent has increased from 8 per cent in 1971 to 23 per cent in 1994 (OPCS, 1996b: 14). Women are more independent from men, but poorer. The meaning of this, in terms of equity and justice for women, is hard to assess, especially since these meanings are culturally and ethnically specific. Different ethnic groups have varied patterns, with South Asian households in the UK the most likely to contain a married couple, and Afro-Caribbean households, followed by White, least likely to contain a married couple.

The political advocacy and representation of women’s interests is also subject to complex changes. Since the winning of political citizenship in the early twentieth century not only has there been a significant reduction in legislation which restricts women’s activities, but also, since the 1970s a major development of equal opportunities legislation, underpinned by the treaties of the European Union. Further, in social movements and the voluntary sector women are significant actors (Miller, Wilford and Donaghue, 1996), whether these movements are clearly of relevance to women as in many feminist organisations, such as the refuge movement for battered women (Charles, 1995), or more indirectly so such as the Greenham protest against cruise missiles and militarism (Roseneil, 1995), the poll tax protests (Bagguley, 1995), and environmentalism (Cudworth, 1996; Plumwood, 1993). Women are also involved in many voluntary associations such as the Mothers Union, Town’s Women’s Guild, the Women’s Institutes, the National Commission for Women and the National Association of Women’s Organisations.

However, women are still significantly underrepresented in the state and many forms of public life, such as Parliament, the institutions of law and order and influential non-governmental bodies. There are very few women in the UK Parliament—only 9.2 per cent of MPs were women following the 1992 election. Women’s representation here has increased very slowly, from nil before 1918, to 2.3 per cent in 1929 (the first year in which all women had the vote) to 2.7 per cent in 1951, 4.1 per cent in 1970, 3.5 per cent in 1983, 6.3 per cent in 1987 and 9.2 per cent in the 1992 general election (Norris and Lovenduski, 1995:103). The greatest changes have occurred in the last decade—only after 1987 have more than 5 per cent of MPs been female. Likewise in senior law and order positions women are notable by their absence—no women Chief Constables until the 1990s, very few senior judges—in 1994, only 4 per cent of High Court judges were women and 6 per cent of circuit judges—while in the lower level of the magistrates’ courts women were 47 per cent of lay magistrates. In 1993 only 28 per cent of public appointments in the UK were held by women, though this is an increase on 19 per cent in 1986. Among ambassadors or heads of overseas missions there were only three women in 150 such posts (British Council, 1996:15). In the corporate sector there are few women chief executives of the large companies. In the second chamber of the British Parliament, the House of Lords, there are very few women as a consequence of the inheritance of titles. There are few women heading the many quangos, or quasi-governmental bodies.

Political pressure during the last two decades has led to significantly more interventionist forms of policing of male violence against women and children including rape, domestic violence and child sex abuse. Pressure, largely from feminists, made male violence into a public issue leading to some significant reforms, such as special training for police dealing with these cases and special units within police stations for example ‘rape suites’ (Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Hanmer, Radford and Stanko, 1989). However, while there has been an increased number of rapes reported to and recorded by the police, the number of convictions in the courts, while increasing, has risen much more slowly: that is, while there is an increasing rate of reporting of rape, there is a declining rate of conviction (Soothill and Walby, 1991). There is a significant increase in the number of employers with policies and procedures to deal with sexual harassment, following some headline cases in industrial tribunals, but it is hard to assess their impact. In areas such as male violence against women, the existing data makes it hard to interpret changes. There has been a greater public awareness of the impact of sexual harassment in the workplace on women’s employment, but we have little evidence on the extent of changes in this. The reported rates of violence against women are increasing but, given that the rate of reporting is low, it is not clear whether this reflects a real increase in the rate of such violence, or merely an increased propensity to report and for the police to record such crimes (Soothill and Walby, 1991).

The forms of sexuality and its representations have changed in complex ways over the last couple of decades. There has been a decline in the discourse and practise of confining sexuality to marriage and an increase in its public presence. Examples include: the increase in extra-marital sexual relations (Lawson and Samson, 1988); increased circulation of pornographic imagery, such as the development of the ‘Page 3’ first in the Sun and then other newspapers; public discussion of the means to control the spread of AIDS; public discussion of the affairs and duties of marriage among royalty.

Cultural representations have changed in complex ways (Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 1991). There is a greater representation of women in positions of authority in some media, such as newscasters, while there has been a backlash against the use of ‘politically correct’ language. Issues which were previously regarded as private matters are increasingly being represented and debated in the public arena. For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s rape and other forms of sexual attack were seldom reported in the press, while since the 1970s and the development of the tabloids these have increasingly become exposed to the public gaze, albeit in often sensationalist forms, which provide misleading images of the typical pattern of men’s attacks on women (Soothill and Walby, 1991). There have been struggles within the Christian churches over whether women can become priests and vicars, with the winning of the right of women to be ordained in the Church of England.

These are tremendous changes in the lives of women and men over the last 20 years or so. There are many areas where some women have gained increasing access to the public domain leading to significantly increased opportunities, but the picture is complicated by the development of new forms of inequality and by the diversity between women.

THEORISING THE DIVERSITY OF GENDER REGIMES

The understanding of the significance of such diversity and inequality has been a driving force in contemporary social theory. This has underlain some of the tension between modernist and postmodernist approaches to the analysis of gender relations which is central to contemporary feminist theorising. Modernist theorising has been criticised as unable to appreciate differences sufficiently and thus easily to become ethnocentric, while the counter criticism of the postmodern alternative is that it has a problematic tendency to relativism. In some instances it has led to any attempt to theorise using the categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ being accused of essentialism. The tension between the rival approaches to the scientific standing of knowledge further underpins this debate: are there systematic ways of reaching closer to reality or truth, or is each discourse equally valid? As I argued in ‘Post-post-modernism: theorising social complexity’ (Walby, 1992), we need a structural, though not structuralist theorisation of gender, which draws on the insights of discourse analysis in the specification of these structures, in order to conceptualise patterns of continuity and difference.

The significance of diversity in gender relations has led some theorists to abandon attempts at overarching theories of gender relations. Instead of modernist-style elegant explanations we have postmodern complexity of interpretation. However, I do not think that it is necessary to give up on causal explanations in order to take seriously the intersection between different forms of gender, ethnicity and class (Walby, 1992).

In order to grasp the different patterns of gender relations we need to have concepts at different levels of abstraction and which capture the major forms of gender system. In earlier work I have used the notions of ‘system of patriarchy’; ‘forms of patriarchy’; ‘structures of patriarchy’; and ‘patriarchal practices’ to catch these different levels. A system of patriarchy was conceptualised as a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women. The six structures of patriarchy are: household production; patriarchal relations in paid work; patriarchal relations in the state; male violence; patriarchal relations in sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions (Walby, 1990).

There are different forms of gender regime or patriarchy as a result of different articulations and combinations of these structures. These gender regimes are systems of interrelated gendered structures. In earlier work I identified a continuum between two main types of patriarchy: private and public. This may be more elegantly described as more domestic and more public gender regimes. The use of the terms ‘gender regime’ as well as that of ‘system of patriarchy’ in this book should not be interpreted as suggesting that systematic gender inequality of patriarchy is over. The domestic gender regime is based upon household production as the main structure and site of women’s work activity and the exploitation of her labour and sexuality and upon the exclusion of women from the public. The public gender regime is based, not on excluding women from the public, but on the segregation and subordination of women within the structures of paid employment and the state, as well as within culture, sexuality and violence. The household does not cease to be a relevant structure in the public form, but is no longer the chief one. In the domestic form the beneficiaries are primarily the individual husbands and fathers of the women in the household, while in the public form there is a more collective appropriation. In the domestic form the principle patriarchal strategy is exclusionary, excluding women from the public arena; in the public it is segregationist and subordinating. In both forms all six structures are relevant, but they have a different relationship to each other. In order to understand any particular instance of gender regime it is always necessary to understand the mutual structuring of class and ethnic relations with gender.

In order to analyse the diversity of gender relations and gender inequality it is important to separate analytically the form of gender regime from the degree of gender inequality. Whether a move to a more public form of gender regime leads to a reduction of gender inequality is an empirical question rather than one to be determined in an a priori fashion.

Different forms of gender regime coexist as a result of the diversity in gender relations consequent upon age, class, ethnicity and region. As a result of the recent changes older women will be more likely than younger women to be involved in a more domestic gender regime. Women whose own occupations place them in higher socio-economic groups are more likely to be in a more public form. Women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are more likely to be in a domestic form and Black Caribbean women more likely to be in a more public form than white women. There are complex interactions between these different forms of gender regime, as well as between gender, ethnicity and class.

Social theories which utilise concepts of structure are not infrequently accused of being rigid, and of underestimating the significance of social action. However, this is not a necessary feature of such accounts. I hold that political action is crucial to changes and the maintenance of gendered structures. For instance, the origin of the variety of patterns of occupational segregation cannot be understood outside of an understanding of the balance of gender and class forces in particular locations, as was argued in Patriarchy at Work. The transformation from a private to public form of patriarchy, of a domestic to a more public gender regime, was due to the impact of first-wave feminism in a context of increased demand for women’s labour (see Theorising Patriarchy). The significance of politics for the analysis of gender relations is not to be underestimated.

Social structures are constantly recreated and changed by the social actions of which they are composed, even though they may appear to any historical individual as a rigid institutional force. The duality of structure (Giddens, 1984) is a relevant notion here as well as elsewhere in social science.

It is especially women’s collective agency, which is the focus in this book, a concentration on women as political actors, in situations and moments when women’s actions have been significant in changing the structures of patriarchy. There is also due recognition to men’s collective agency, often, though not always in opposition to feminist action. Further, women’s individual agency is found in the myriad ways in which women actively choose options within the constrained opportunities available to them women act, but not always in circumstances of their choosing.

SPACE

Different patterns of gender relations are found in different spatial locations. These variations are due to the balance of gender and class forces sedimented over time in local gendered institutions including the local industrial structure and the local political institutions. Changes in the economy and the sexual division of labour occur unevenly through time and space. For instance, while women are almost half of employees in employment overall in Britain, in one-third of local labour markets they constitute the majority of such workers. Restructuring depends upon the balance of forces in any particular location. Chapters 4 and 5 on gender restructuring in five local labour markets show how varied can be the outcomes in terms of the extent of women’s participation in paid work, the degree to which this is part-time or full-time, and the nature of occupational and industrial segregation. The restructuring of gender relations in any locality depends upon the previous set of social relations which resulted from previous rounds of restructuring. The forces which affect this include among others, organised representation of the gendered interests of women and men, combined worker interests, different ethnic relations, the structure of the employer’s interests.

Different gendered structures have different spatial reaches. For instance, some organised religions transcend national boundaries, while systems of industrial relations are more usually restricted to a specific national context. Globalisation is one of the more significant processes affecting the restructuring of local labour markets, with its increased pressures on economic competitiveness, at least partly due to the increased mobility of capital and the speed of international communications. Further, there are changing and overlapping remits of different states and state-like bodies, for instance, with the increasing jurisdiction of EU regulations in the domestic legislation of its Member States. The European Union is emerging as increasingly significant in the restructuring of gender relations in employment in the UK as a result of increasing market integration and the increasing remit of the European Union to regulate labour markets and to ensure equal treatment of women and men in employment. These issues are discussed further in Chapters 10, ‘Woman and nation’ and 11, ‘Gender and European integration’.

TIME

Time is key to the understanding of change and diversity in gender relations. Notions of time as naturalistic—involving a standard movement from one point to another—have been problematised by recent writers. There has been a major increase in interest in time in the theorisation of society for example Adam (1990, 1995), Giddens (1984), Harvey (1990), Lash and Urry (1994), Nowotny (1994). Time is no longer seen as simply the same as that shown on a clock, but as something which is socially perceived, constructed, refracted and implicated in complex and various ways. It is no longer of interest merely as the medium through which social change takes place, but has become an active resource in the creation of this change.

But much of the writing, while sensitive to social variability, has paid little explicit attention to gender relations (though there are notable exceptions, e.g. Adam, 1995; Davies, 1990). Some of the analysis is abstracted in such a way as to make gender legitimately irrelevant. But in many accounts of empirical patterns of social relations and social experiences gender is relevant and the analysis is flawed as a consequence of its omission.

These problems of omission are particularly acute when writers are trying to describe and explain the nature and significance of temporal processes involved in industrialisation and the development of capitalism. Here the major group considered is usually that of wage earners working under the new relations of production. These are disproportionately men, even now. But it is not only the focus which is the problem, for we could simply say that we should merely add on an adjective, male, to restrict the scope of the analysis to one half of society and the description would become accurate. It is more that the experiences...